Just when you thought Defender, our answer to WordPress security, couldn’t get any better — with the release of v2.4, he’s now better than ever!
Defender Pro now comes with two-factor authentication integrations, a new notifications interface, bulk actions for security recommendations, and more.
These improvements help you customize your security options and streamline recommended security precautions.
Here’s a breakdown of the new features. We’ll look at how to:
This article will give you a quick overview of what’s new, and you’ll be able to implement them in Defender Pro today!
1. Quickly Activate and Schedule Reports in the New Notifications Area
Defender has a new look and better functionality with Notifications. It’s a centralized manager area for all notifications and reports.
The Notifications area gives you a complete overview of the reports, whether it’s enabled or not, gravatars icons of the email recipients, and reports’ frequency.
All the security reports can be enabled here.
You can configure and disable reports in one-click. If a report can be enabled, you’ll see a plus sign next to it.
Tapping the plus sign gets your notification enabled.
Once clicked, you can choose who to send email notifications to.
You can easily search for recipients to add by username or click on an individual user from the list. Alternatively, you can always invite a user by email by clicking Invite by Email.
Quickly add a new user by username in the search bar.
If the report is already enabled, clicking on the gear icon will allow you to configure it by adding recipients, frequency of reports, day & time of reports, and additional settings.
Configure or disable a report from the gear icon.
Want to configure reports in bulk? You can do that in a snap with the new Bulk Action dropdown. This will give you the option to Enable, Disable, and Update reports all at once.
Enable all of the security reports and notifications at once.
If you enable the reports, Defender will direct you to set up your Recipients, Configure Notifications, add the times and dates for reports, and more — all in bulk.
Click on the individual reports to set up times when you want you and your recipients to receive them.
You can also send notifications without a recipient for the Malware Scanning report when you configure it.
If you opt for this, your reports will still be conducted, but they won’t go to your email and instead can be viewed in The Hub.
You can choose to get no email report for Malware scanning and just view it in The Hub instead.
Defender has made it quick and easy to manage your reports, notifications, and recipients. This can all be set up in just a few clicks!
2. Easily Integrate 2FA with Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, or Authy
Another great new feature for Defender is now you can integrate two-factor authentication with more than Google Authenticator. We’ve now added options for Microsoft Authenticator and Authy!
This is all done in one click. You simply go to the 2FA section in Defender’s dashboard. From there, you choose whatever 2FA option you’d like.
Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, or Authy. The choice is yours!
Once you choose your option, select whether to download it from Google Play or the App Store and you’re all set.
3. Take Care of Security Recommendations in Bulk
Instead of handling security recommendations one-by-one, you can get them all handled in an instant with bulk updates. Likewise, you can choose to ignore all of the security recommendations at once.
This can all be done from the Recommendations area in Defender’s dashboard. From here, you’ll see the number of security recommendations at the top of the screen.
In this example, there are four recommendations.
If you have recommendations, you can then bulk action them. You can choose to Action All or Ignore All.
Select all of them at once by checking the Security Recommendations box or click individual recommendations. Once you decide on what to do, it’s done by simply clicking Apply.
Handle all of the recommendations instantly.
As always, you can always view the recommendations in detail with the dropdown by each recommendation. It will give you an overview and more information.
The dropdown will give you very detailed information about the security recommendation.
If you have any questions or can’t decide whether to delete or ignore a security recommendation from Defender, just reach out to our 24/7 support for expert help and advice.
And That’s Not All…
We didn’t stop there. A few other new features for Defender includes onboarding that replaces the old quick setup and enables everything that is recommended and better UI/UX and performance for Malware Scanning.
Beyond that, there are always new features and developments happening regularly!
Our team of dedicated developers and programmers are always keeping Defender up-to-date with the latest recommendations, security protocols, and more!
With our integrated videos plugin, you can embed high-quality educational tutorial videos on your site’s frontend and admin!
Video tutorials are a great resource to share insightful information in an organized way for you and your users.
The Integrated Video Tutorials plugin (IVT) functions as a perfect method to improve WordPress skills, onboard new users, and reduce support requests, making it valuable for anyone with access to your site to refer to.
Included are 45+ WordPress training videos which we keep regularly updated, white-label branding, user displays, and more. Plus, you can create and have your own custom training videos, along with even customized playlists.
In this article, you will learn how to get the most out of integrated tutorials. I’ll be going over how to:
When you’re finished reading, you’ll know the best way to deploy these videos for your WordPress sites and use them to their full potential — in just a few clicks!
1. Install the Plugin and Explore the Overview of the Videos Dashboard
From The Hub dashboard, you can download the integrated videos plugin from the Plugins tab. Once you click on the integrated videos tab, you’ll get the options to Install or Download.
When downloading, there’s also a detailed description of what’s all included.
Choosing to install makes it simple. It will pull-up all of the sites you have in The Hub, and you can install it directly from here and your WordPress dashboard.
Simply click on the website that you’d like to install the video tutorials on.
Once installed, you can get a 360-degree overview of the dashboard. From here, you can view the most recently updated video, playlists, create new videos, and more.
Quickly gain access to your videos from the dashboard.
You can see the total videos you have at the top of the dashboard, the date of the last uploaded video, your most recently updated video, your newly created custom video, and the latest playlist you created.
In this example, you can see there are 49 total videos available.
In the Video section, you can quickly access all of the 45+ videos that come with the plugin, create a custom video, edit the titles, and more.
Go to any video to quickly access it.
And finally, in the dashboard, the Playlists area lets you view and edit all of your playlists.
Quickly view all your playlists by clicking on the ‘View All’ button.
It’s fast and easy to organize, access, create playlists and more — right from the dashboard.
2. Quickly Add a Custom Video
Do you need to explain something to your users that aren’t already covered in our videos? Something specific to your brand or your website? No problem! Integrated Video Tutorials lets you add custom videos quickly and easily.
From the Video section of the dashboard, get started by clicking the Add Custom Video button.
Be on the way to a custom video in one-click.
The Add Custom Video button opens up an area where you’ll select what source your custom video is hosted from. You have the options for Wistia, YouTube, and Vimeo. (Note: More options are coming very soon for Dailymotion, Amazon S3, Google Drive, and more!)
Simply choose what option you have for the video and add the link.
In this example, it’s a YouTube video.
From here, you can change the title and set a customized start & end time. Also, upload a thumbnail image if you’d like.
Want to change the title? Change it right in the title bar.
After hitting continue, add it to a playlist in a click. A drop-down menu will appear with all of your current playlists options. You can even add it to multiple playlists at one time!
When done, it’ll be all set to go when you hit Publish.
Add a video to as many playlists as you like.
It’s then displayed in the Available Videos.
The newest video shows up on top.
You can access it and edit the custom video at any time.
Next, I’ll show you how to…
3. Edit and View Videos
Quickly access your custom video to edit and view in just a few clicks. You’ll simply go to the Available Videos section, find your video, and access or edit accordingly.
Click on the gear icon next to the video you’d like to gain access to and you’ll get the options to Edit Video, Copy Shortcode, or Delete.
A dropdown menu appears with various options.
When you click Edit, you’ll get the options that were discussed earlier for custom videos. You can change the title, start & end time, and upload a thumbnail image.
Upload a custom image to go with your video.
For any of the pre-uploaded videos that come with this plugin, you have the option to Edit Title and Copy Shortcode.
The duration of time for each video is also displayed.
Preview any video by clicking on the video title in the Available Videos section.
Play the video in the preview area at any time.
Ready to publish? Use the Shortcode to embed videos. Add the shortcode to any acceptable area, and you’ll be all set.
An example of using the shortcode on a new post.
It’s as simple as that to access and edit videos!
4. Easily Create a Customized Playlist
Manage, create, delete, and customize playlists from the Playlists area. Playlists are great when you have a specific topic that includes several related areas you would like to cover in separate videos.
This section shows you how many playlists you currently have, recently created playlists, and recently updated playlists.
The playlist dashboard has everything you need to manage your playlists.
Let’s create a new playlist first. To do that, click on Create Playlist.
The Create Playlist button is on the very top of the page.
It will then prompt you to add a name, description, and – if you want – a thumbnail image.
If you don’t upload a thumbnail image, a default one will be used from the first video’s thumbnail.
Once Continue is hit, you can search for videos to add or simply click on the ones you want to include in the playlist. If you want to delete one from the list, you can do that as well in one-click.
Add as many videos as you’d like!
Your playlist will then appear with all of the other playlists you already have.
With any of the playlists, you can click on the gear icon and get the options to:
Edit
Add videos
Add visibility settings
Copy shortcode
Delete
The gear icon opens up a lot of options to your playlists.
Editing and adding videos is exactly the same as when they’re created. And if you add Visibility Settings, you can control which user roles (e.g. author) can view the playlist and the default locations for it to display.
Pick and choose what default locations will show this playlist.
Add a video at any time to a playlist quickly by clicking on the icon next to a video. You’ll then choose what playlist you want to add it to, and you can also add it to multiple playlists by checking the boxes.
Pick any amount of playlists that you’d like by checking the boxes next to each one.
And just like that, you have a customized playlist for your video tutorials.
5. Adjust Additional Settings
You can adjust additional settings for your tutorials in the Settings area in the admin. This is so you can determine how your videos should display in the admin area of your website.
In the Display Settings section, you can enable a tutorials tab in the WordPress admin sidebar in the Tutorials Tab area in one-click
Determine the location of the videos page in the admin menu. You can pick to display all the videos under the WordPress Dashboard menu item, or you can have it be a top-level menu item.
Plus, you can set the menu title that will be displayed as your tutorial videos menu in the WordPress admin sidebar.
In this example, the WP Admin sidebar will show ‘Video Tutorials’ as the tab.
The Help Videos area is where you can enable the option to have videos appear in the Contextual Help boxes. It’s based on how you set your visibility settings for your playlists.
Add videos to the Contextual Help area in one-click.
Do you want someone else to have admin access to edit playlists and videos? You can configure permissions in the Permissions area.
Simply choose which user roles can have access.
If you just want the administrator to have access, just check that box — and that’s it!
Once you change the settings, you can always adjust them at any time.
Closing Credits
As we close the credits on this post, you can see how using our integrated video tutorials is quick, easy, and beneficial. And since we already have you stocked up with over 45 useful videos to begin with, you can implement them right away!
For more information, be sure to check out our documentation. And keep tabs on what’s coming up next in our Roadmap.
Install the plugin to train and empower new WordPress users and start reducing your support costs today!
With The Hub, you can easily manage, monitor, scan, access, and maintain unlimited WordPress sites — all in one place! Everything you need for security, performance, SEO, white labeling, and streamlined site management is available in just a few clicks.
This article shows you how to get the most out of The Hub and how to use it to its full potential. As you’ll see, there’s a TON you can do.
All of these features can be accessed from the tabs above The Hub Overview screen.
The Hub Overview screen.
You’ll need to have your site connected to The Hub first. If you need help with this, please see how to add a site here.
Once you have your sites connected, you can enable the SSO (Single Sign-On). This is so you can securely access your sites from The Hub without having to sign in separately for each one.
Check out this quick video or documentation to see how easy it is to set up SSO.
Now that we have the foundation for getting started with The Hub set, let’s go through each of these sections:
1. Manage Your Plugins & Themes
All your site’s plugins and themes can be managed, viewed, updated, activated & deactivated, deleted, and starred as a favorite from the Plugins & Themes tab.
Plus, you can add plugins & themes and keep everything updated automatically with Automate’s help. Automate is our automatic update WordPress manager.
Click on Plugins & Themes to get started.
From here, see all of the active and inactive plugins you have from the Plugins tab. They’re arranged by Core, Active, and Inactive plugins. It also shows what version of each plugin you currently have.
Every plugin you have is listed in this area.
You can bulk activate, deactivate, mark as a favorite, or delete. Or, you can do the same functions on individual plugins.
Same time and do things in bulk.
And if you’d like to add a plugin, you can do so with a click of a button.
This will take you to all of our available plugins.
The Themes tab will show you what themes you have available for your WordPress site by Active and Inactive. Delete themes from here and also add a new one by clicking Add Theme. It also shows what versions of the themes you have.
The themes can also be deleted in bulk or individually. Plus, you can customize the theme by clicking on the magic wand, which will then take you to the WordPress admin.
Check for updates in the Updates tab.
It will show you all of the plugins that need to be updated and the version that it will update to. You can update all of them in bulk or individually. It will even give you the option to update plugins that aren’t activated.
By checking the box on top, these updates will be done in bulk by clicking the blue ‘Update’ button.
If you’re not fond of manual updates, you can set up Automate to do all of the updating for you from the Automate tab.
It’s quick and easy to get started using automatic updates. If you’re initially getting it set up, Automate walks you through the process.
Clicking the ‘Get Started’ button will get Automate started.
After clicking Get Started, he’ll ask if you’re keen on updating manually or if you want to auto-update all. Then, you can customize how frequently you want Automate to check for updates or choose the every three hours option.
Customize the frequency to whatever you’d like.
Not only that, you can pick the option to backup your entire site before each update with Auto Backup. Auto backups will ensure your site stays in good shape in case any mishaps happen after an update.
Choose whether you want auto backups or not before each update.
Then, you can choose to have a Safe Update Check. This will tell you if your site is down and show you any visual changes on your pages that you select. You can decide to have this for your homepage, up to five custom pages, or not to do this at all.
Choose if you’d like the safe update feature or not.
You’ll also get an option for Safe Update Alerts, where you’ll get an email sent to you if there’s a specific percentage change.
Choose 25%, a custom percentage, or ‘no’ if you don’t want email alerts.
Once Automate’s all set up, it will show you the schedule of when updates occur, if the auto backup is on, and all of your plugins that are updated.
You can turn off an update on specific plugins and change the frequency of updates at any time from the Settings tab.
All the updates are shown in one place.
From the Activity Log, you can see up-to-date updates. Plus, you can view results in detail with the dropdown in each specific area.
The Activity Log has all of your updated activity listed by date and time.
As you can see, keeping your plugins and themes updated and in good shape is as simple as it gets in The Hub.
Access to your WordPress site’s security has never been as accessible and simple to monitor thanks to The Hub’s Security area. From it, you can check security issues, run reports, view audit logs, and maintain other features to keep your site secure.
It works in collaboration with Defender. He’s our answer to protect against hackers, brute force attacks, and malicious bots. Once Defender is installed on your site, all security precautions are accessible through The Hub.
Access the security area by clicking on Security in The Hub overview or from the Security tab.
Both options will get you to better security.
Click on Security and you’ll get a 360 view of all of the security features categorized by individual sections.
There is a ton that can be done to boost your site’s security.
The Security section shows you the total number of security issues and when the next scheduled scan is set to run. You can also set up a scheduled scan and run one instantly.
Want to run a scan? Click on Run Scan to do so.
In the Firewall tab, you can protect your login area and have any suspicious activity locked out.
It shows what type of Firewall you have set up.
WAF is the first layer of protection that blocks hackers and bot attacks before they even get close to your site. The Firewall section shows you what type of firewall protection you have.
Here, you can also enter IPs in the Allowlist, Blocklist, User AgentAllowlist, User Agent Blocklist, URL Allowlist, and Disabled Rule Ids.
With one-click, your security gets beefed-up.
Click on View Logs to instantly view your WAF logs directly in The Hub.
All the WAF logs are in one place.
You’ll instantly see how many potentially malicious files there are to review in the Malware Detection area. Access them by clicking View Issues.
Also, enable and set up Email Notifications for when Defender has finished Malware scans.
In this example, you can see there are 11 files to review potentially malicious files.
With the Audit Logging area, track, and log events when changes are made to your website. You can view the last 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days. It also shows you when the previous event and the number of events were logged.
Choose how far back you’d like to view the events logged.
Add an extra boost of security to your login area with Two-Factor Authentication. The Hub will show you the status of it (whether it’s on or off). You can also turn on the Lost Phone Authentication from this area.
The status’ of two-factor authentication and lost phone authentication are displayed.
To keep tabs on what’s happening with your security, you can set up tailored security reports, so you don’t even need to check The Hub. Set it up in the Your Reports area. They’ll be delivered right to your inbox.
Set up reports for Malware Detection, Firewall, and Audit Logging — all a few clicks away!
It indicates what reports are active and when they’re set up.
With the reports, you can change the date, time of day, and frequency of reports at any time.
The Recommendations area will show you security tweaks that you can make to enhance your security against hackers and bots trying to break in.
They are organized by Action (recommended tweaks) and Actioned (already taken care of tweaks). You can also set up email notifications when recommendations occur.
The current PHP and WordPress version is also on display.
With Blocklist Monitor, automatically check to see if you’re on Google’s blocklist monitor. It examines this for your WordPress site every six hours. If you do happen to end up on the blacklist, we’ll automatically send you an email.
The green checkmark means your status is good for Google.
For even more enhanced protection against the most aggressive hackers and bots, there are Advanced Tools, such as X-Frame-Options, X-XSS-Protection, X-Content-Type-Options, and Mask Login Area. They can be enabled in just a few clicks.
Decide what advanced tools you’d like to enable.
Getting the most out of your security is all done from The Hub. Hackers up to no good, and bots don’t stand a chance. And often, they’re stopped in their tracks before even getting close to your site.
Optimizing your site for speed can seem challenging, but thanks to our powerful plugins, Hummingbird and Smush – it’s easier than ever to monitor and enhance your site’s speed from The Hub.
Hummingbird delivers quicker loading pages by using an easy-to-use interface and one-click automated optimization features. You can have complete control of your site’s optimization with advanced settings & options, technical recommendations, simple to understand score metrics, continuous monitoring of performance issues, and more.
Smush will bulk optimize every image on your site with one-click. Smush fixes Google PageSpeed with the best image optimizer WordPress has ever known.
These two plugins, combined with The Hub, make keeping tabs and optimizing your site’s performance a breeze.
All of this is accessed in the Performance tab or the Performance section in The Hub overview.
The Performance tab and section in The Hub overview is quick to access from the Overview section.
When you’re in the Performance area, you’ll see all that you’re able to do regarding speed.
There’s a lot you can do to tweak performance.
The Performance area is where you can run a speed performance test and see your score.
Check your score based on desktop and mobile. It will also allow you to schedule speed performance tests and view when the last one was.
Run a test in one-click.
By clicking on the ellipsis, you can view even more options, including:
Run Test
View in WP Admin
View Full Report
Ignore Warnings
Display Options
An option to Deactivate the performance feature is also done from here.
There’s a lot that can be done in one-click.
There’s a ton you can accomplish to tweak your score for optimal performance. Be sure to read our documentation for more details.
With the Response Time section, you can monitor your server response time. It will let you know when your website is down or too slow for your visitors. You can adjust the timeline to the last 24 hours, the previous seven days, or the last 30 days.
Response time is monitored all the time to keep tabs on your site staying active.
With the Speed Test, you can run a Google page speed test and get itemized insights — with fixes on how to improve your site’s performance.
The Score Metrics is based on:
First Contentful Paint
First Meaningful Paint
Speed Index
First CPU Idle
Time to Interactive
To learn more about what the above score metrics mean, see these tutorials:
When clicking each metric, it will open up a new tab in Hummingbird, where you can view recommendations on how to fix it.
The speed test includes areas where you can improve your site’s performance.
The Audits tab will show you the results of a performance test, opportunities to fix performance, diagnostics, and passed audits.
With this test, you can see there’s one opportunity for improvement.
Finally, in the speed test section, the Historic Field Data tab will show you historical data when you have a well-established website.
You’ll be able to keep your site running at top-speed with all of the information provided in The Hub and by improving performance issues when necessary.
Moving on to the Image Optimization area, you can view if you have Smush on or off under Super-Smush savings. Plus, it shows you the total savings (in KBs), images smushed, and images resized.
Also, manage the Smush CDN, turn on Lazy Load, and access additional tools (e.g. resize detection).
Image optimization is all in one place.
With GZIP Compression, you can compress your webpages and stylesheets before sending them to your visitor’s browser, which drastically reduces travel time.
It shows you your server type and whether HTML, Javascript, and CSS are on.
Asset Optimization will optimize your assets by compressing and organizing them in a way that improves page load times. There are automated options, or you can configure each file yourself.
This area shows you the total reductions, total files, whether WPMU DEV CDN is on or off, and allows quick access to additional settings. Plus, it will show you what files you have set up to optimize automatically (e.g. Javascript & CSS).
Adjust settings in Hummingbird by clicking on the gear icon.
Caching stores files temporarily on your visitors’ website so that they don’t have to download assets twice. You can manage caching from The Hub and Hummingbird by changing the recommended expiry, changing your server type, and checking the status.
The lifespan of the caches is also indicated.
There’s also the option to turn on or off Page Caching, Gravatar Caching, and RSS. Also, you can Clear Cache by choosing what caches you want to clear.
Clicking ‘Clear Cache’ is all you need to do once you have your selected options.
The Advanced Tools allows you to turn on or off URL Query Strings, WooCommerce Cart Fragments, and Emojis to boost your performance.
Also schedule a database cleanup and view dispensable entries.
There are many minor tweaks you can make to enhance performance with Advanced Tools.
With Your Reports, you can create customized reports that get sent directly to your inbox.
Reports are just a few clicks away.
4. View Your Site’s Insights (in detail)
To view the detailed information in The Hub, clicking on View Details gives you a better look at the monitoring activities. You can also get to these details by clicking the Insights tab.
Get to this area from Insights or by clicking View Details.
From here, you can view Uptime, Downtime, Response Time, and Alert-Info.
Adjust the time frame to view the uptime.
Plus, you can re-check the information, adjust the threshold, and get email notifications in the Settings area.
Get notifications by email, so you don’t even need to monitor The Hub for any downtime and uptime alerts.
In the Response Time area, you can also view your traffic information from the Analytics tab.
The analytics also includes pageviews, visit times, bounce rates, and gen time.
View all the analytics information by visits and unique visits.
It’s important to know that your website is up-and-running. The performance area of The Hub will let you know with constant monitoring, email notifications, and alerts.
SmartCrawl and The Hub make managing WordPress SEO easy. You can optimize your website or network for more traffic and improve your search engine results.
Get to your site’s content analysis’, conduct automated SEO reports, scans, and more from the SEO area in The Hub Overview or the SEO tab.
Your SEO is covered, thanks to SmartCrawl and The Hub.
The SEO opens up everything you’ll need to rank higher in the SERPs.
There’s a ton you can do for your SEO — all in one place.
You can see your current SEO score from the SEO area, know when the last checkup was, and run a checkup with a button click.
Run a checkup and more from the SEO area.
SEO Checkup area is designed to quickly and efficiently take care of SEO issues to help optimize your website for search engines and social media.
This area enables you to view your issues and take care of them in just a few clicks. Plus, you can see your resolved & ignored issues and schedule a regular SEO checkup that will send reports directly to your inbox.
Want to set up a scheduled scan? Simply hit ‘Set Up,’ and you’ll be able to get one going.
The Content Analysis is where you can view your overall SEO analysis and overall readability analysis. It will give you recommendations on how to rank highly and ensure your site is easy for the average person to read.
The SEO analysis is either Good or Poor and Easy, Okay, and Difficult rank the readability.
From the Site Crawler area, you can run a scan to detect URL issues. That goes for broken URLs, 404s, multiple redirections, and absent URLs. All of these factors can disrupt rankings in search engines.
From here, you can run or schedule a scan. Also, it will display the number of issues, missing URLs, and total URLs discovered. Lastly, you can see when your last site crawler to scan was conducted.
Want to run a scan? Click the ‘Run Scan’ button, and you’re all set!
In the Social area, control and optimize how your WordPress site will appear on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
This is done by enabling OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, and for Pinterest, you can add verification so that it attributes your website when content from it is pinned to the platform.
It will display what features you have on.
To get SEO checkup and Site Crawler reports delivered right to your inbox, you can enable this from the Your Reports area.
You can get a report scheduled in just a few clicks.
With Automatic Linking, you can set it up to automatically look for keywords that match posts and pages and then link them to your website.
You can even add custom links and exclusions!
There are a lot of categories to link automatically.
With the Titles & Meta area, you control how your WordPress site’s pages, posts, and custom post types appear in search engines.
When clicked, you’ll also get recommendations about wordcount and what to include in your descriptions.
This section also shows the number of Public Post Types.
Let search engines know whether you’re an organization or a person with Schema. With Schema, you can also add all of your social profiles, so search engines understand what social profiles to attribute your web content.
This shows whether you’re an organization or a person.
Also, connect with Moz to get even more detailed SEO reporting for your site. You’ll need to create an account, then once activated, it will be an accessible section for you in The Hub.
Create comprehensive white label activity and performance reports for you and your clients from the Reports tab and Reports area in The Hub overview.
The Reports area is accessible in the Reports tab and Hub Overview.
It works by pulling data from your active plugins & services. It then creates reports that cover Updates, Security, Performance, Backups, SEO, Uptime, and Analytics. Then, it will deliver these reports directly to your inbox.
It’s easy to get started. Click on the Reports tab, and it’ll give you the option to Create Report.
Dev Man is ready to help you create a new report.
You give the new report a name, and then you can start to configure it with the options for:
Language: Choose between 20+ languages from the dropdown.
Date Format: There are four formats to pick from, or you can create a custom one.
Time Format: Like the date format, you can customize the time format or choose between three options.
Report Type: This allows you to gauge the report’s information, based on who will be reading it: Summary (for clients) or Detailed (for developers).
Multisite: If you’re creating a multisite report, this option is used to create one for the whole network.
Multisite is an option if you have a multisite. If not, it won’t appear.
Then edit your email structure in the Email Content area with customization in these fields:
Subject: What the email subject is.
Summary (optional): You can include a short introduction to the report.
Report filename domain: This is the filename for the report.
Main content: What’s included in the body of the email.
Customize the email exactly how you want it to be.
It’s probably a good time to mention that you can see a preview of what the report is looking like at any time as you go through creating a report. Just click the Preview button.
Make sure your report is looking good with a preview.
Going forward with the report, you’re able to add specific services in one-click to the report in the Services area. You can choose to include:
Updates
Security
Performance
SEO
Backups
Uptime
Analytics
Select what services you want to include.
From this point, you can customize your cover page. Add your logo, colors, and font color. Simply click on the labeled areas to do so.
Brand your report.
The Generate area is for the email sender details. You can control and edit:
Sender name
Reply-to
Schedule
Recipients
Edit the email details as precisely as you’d like.
If you don’t schedule a report, it’s sent out immediately once you have it completed.
When a report’s sent out, your recipients will receive a totally white labeled PDF report with all of the specific information you wanted to include, delivered right to their inbox.
A clean report that has it all!
Manage Reports in the Dashboard
From the Reports Dashboard, you can gain quick access to reports, create a new report, modify existing reports, see when the next report is scheduled, and more.
There’s a lot you can do from the reports dashboard.
Each report has the details for it, including the report’s name, type of report (Client or Dev), services included in the report (e.g. SEO, analytics, etc.), frequency schedule, when the next report is, and when it was created.
All of the services are shown as emblems to indicate that they’re included in the report.
When you click on the ellipsis on a report, you’ll get options to manage, rename, download the last report, email the last report, and to delete it.
Clicking on the ellipsis will create a dropdown with the options.
Create a new report from the New Report button.
One-click is all it takes to get started with a new report.
Also, you have quick access to reports from the History tab. From here, you can download reports, see when they’re scheduled, view the number of recipients, and get the size of the report.
Clicking the download arrow will download a PDF of the report.
White label reporting is quick and easy, thanks to The Hub. You can keep yourself, and your clients, in the know of all of your vital website information.
For more information on detailed white labeled reports, click here.
7. Create Filters and Labels
With The Hub’s Filters & Labels, you can selectively order groups of your WordPress sites based on a few standard categories and labels. This makes organizing and accessing your websites is simple and effortless.
The Filters & Labels make filtering your sites simple.
You can filter by:
Updates
Security
Speed
SEO
Backups
Uptime
Once you select a filter, it will pull-up all the sites with that feature and organize them according to what you chose.
In this example, ‘updates’ were selected. The sites appear then based on the selection.
Also, you can label sites by any color you choose. Plus, create a new label (e.g. eCommerce) for a specific site to help you organize your sites better.
Choose from one of the predetermined labels or create your own.
With Filters & Labels, gaining access to your site is now quick and in your control. To find out much more detailed information, be sure to read our article, More Labels & Languages — The Hub Just Gets Better.
8. Make Advanced White Labels
With our white labels, you can replace our documentation, links, and (gulp!) even our superheroes with your branding.
The White Label tab is where you can get started.
It’s easy to white label practically everything to make everything geared towards your brand.
From there, you’ll see about white labeling our plugins and also white labeling The Hub. This will lead you to download our plugins: WPMU DEV dashboard plugin (which should be installed already if you’re a member) and The Hub Client plugin.
Two great options for white labeling are a few clicks away!
When it comes to white labeling in your WordPress admin, simply go to the WPMU DEV dashboard on your WordPress site. From there, you’ll see a section called Whitelabel.
Once you click ‘Activate,’ you’ll be ready to white label.
Now, you can white label the branding, footer text, admin menu labels (with the help of our white label plugin, Branda Pro), and remove our documentation, tutorials & products.
Our superheroes will be okay with it if you don’t want them here.
With The Hub Client, you can completely white label the Hub and client’s dashboard, so The Hub becomes YOUR Hub customized to your brand.
Once the plugin is downloaded, all white labeling can be done on the Hub Client dashboard. From this spot, you can change the settings to suit your preference. That includes:
Adding your brand name
Replacing the WPMU DEV logo with your own
Choosing a color scheme for the navigation background, navigation text, and navigation test selected & hover
Configuring the navigation
Setting up the client page
Managing users & roles
Including terms of service URL
Adding a privacy policies URL
White label as much or as little as you’d like.
Practically everything can be white labeled for you and your clients.
Example of the login area for your clients after adding a custom Dev Man image and colors.
From the Backups tab, you can view the dates & time of backups, get details on each backup, download the backup file, create a backup, and view the backup schedule for your WordPress site.
View all of the updates and the dates when each update occurred.
When you click on individual backups, you can get detailed information. You can also restore the backup with the Restore button. If you click on the ellipsis, it will download the report.
The backup details show the date, type of backup, and filename.
From the Settings tab, create a backup and get information about your backup schedule and storage cycle.
Create a backup in one-click.
Ensuring that your site is backed up is essential. You can sleep well, knowing that your site is in good shape with automatic backups and the detailed information that comes with them.
This article features a lot to get the most out of The Hub — but it doesn’t end there! The Hub has a ton of additional features, including managed hosting, 24/7 live expert support, exclusive members community, and much more.
We’re continuously working to improve The Hub. Everything from new tabs to labels & languages, The Hub just keeps getting better. Thanks to our team of developers, the best is yet to come.
Be sure to keep tabs on what’s next with The Hub with our Roadmap.
For centralized and effective WordPress site management, there’s no sub for The Hub. Be sure to get the most out of it today.
With SmartCrawl and The Hub, you can manage WordPress SEO with modules that will optimize your website or network for more traffic and better search engine results.
Access to SmartCrawl can be all done right from The Hub’s dashboard for all of your sites, making keeping on top of your SEO more streamlined, accessible, and easy!
You can quickly view and get into your site’s content analysis’, scans, reports, and more. Plus, most of the features can be enabled in one click.
All of this is done from The Hub’s SEO tab or the SEO section in The Hub overview.
You’ll be creating clear, targeted content and rank higher in Google. Also, you’ll keep up with the SERPs by continuously being able to monitor tabs on improvements and optimization.
1. Instantly Run and Set Up Automated SEO Checkups
From the SEO section in The Hub, you can quickly view your SEO score and see when your last SEO checkup was.
The SEO Checkup will run a full SEO scan of your WordPress site and provide a comprehensive report of how good your site is optimized for search engine optimization and social media.
To instantly run a checkup and get a full report about what you need to fix or adjust on your site to make it more SEO friendly, click Run Checkup.
A checkup is completed with one tap of a button.
It will run a check-up and let you know if your score has changed at all. It’s as simple as that to get a glimpse of where you’re at with your SEO.
To get this set up automatically, click on the gear icon. The gear icon will open a new tab in SmartCrawl’s Reporting dashboard.
From here, you can enable scheduled checkups in one-click. Once enabled, you can add recipients and schedule daily, weekly, or monthly reports. Plus, you can choose the day of the week and time.
Pick whatever date and time are convenient for you.
See our SEO Score documentation for detailed information about using this section.
Now that we have our reports set up let’s…
2. Access SEO Checkup and Site Crawler Reports with One-Click
The SEO Checkup area in The Hub offers you a comprehensive report on how optimized your WordPress site is for search engines. It shows you the number of issues you have and how many of them have been resolved or ignored.
Plus, you can view your next scheduled check and edit accordingly.
All of your SEO Checkup reporting is in one place.
By clicking on Issues, you’ll have a new tab open up that will display your SEO score. You’ll also see your last checkup, the SEO issues, and your next scheduled report.
The current SEO score, last SEO checkup, SEO issues, and more are displayed here.
If you scroll down to the Checkup section below this area, you can review all of your SEO issues with a yellow exclamation point. You’ll also see all of the resolved issues, indicated by a green checkmark.
Scroll down to see all of the issues that need to be addressed and taken care of.
Furthermore, you’re able to view your issues that need taken care of or resolved by clicking on Resolved and Ignored from The Hub.
Find out what issues are resolved and ignored by clicking on either of these two options.
When it comes to site crawler reports, all of that is done in The Hub’s Site Crawler area.
From here, you can run Site Crawler to detect any URL issues (e.g. broken links, 404s, multiple redirections, etc.) that might interfere with rankings in search engines.
All the Issues, Missing URLs, and Total URLs are on display. You can also schedule your next scan, run a scan, and see when the last site crawl scan was completed.
View all the issues and more from this area.
By clicking on View Issues, you can view all of the issues that the site crawler discovered. It will open up a new tab in SmartCrawl’s dashboard. The number of issues is then displayed.
Scrolling down, you can view each issue in detail, ignore them, list occurrences (to see where these links can be found), and redirect any broken URL to a new link.
By tapping on the gear icon, you can list occurrences, redirect, or ignore any issue.
You can quickly run a new scan by clicking New Scan or get one set up by clicking Set Up.
The next scheduled scan will also appear here when implemented.
To run a regular URL crawl and have reports sent to your inbox, all it takes is a flip of a switch. Once you’ve done this, you can add recipients and set a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Also, you can set the day of the week and time to have reports sent out.
Run a report and add recipients.
You’re now all set up for automated reporting to keep track of your site’s SEO!
3. Automatically Generate Detailed Sitemaps
With The Hub and SmartCrawl, you can automatically generate a sitemap and regularly send updates to Google. A sitemap ensures that your site stays as SEO friendly as possible consistently.
Get started by clicking on Site Crawler in The Hub dashboard.
Clicking on Site Crawler is all you need to do to get started.
This will open up a new tab in SmartCrawl’s dashboard. Here, you can see that SmartCrawl’s sitemap is activated, and it provides the URL where the sitemap is available. You can also switch to the WordPress core sitemap if you’d prefer.
Disable SmartCrawl’s sitemap with one-click if you’d prefer to use WordPress instead.
To see the difference between WordPress’ and SmartCrawl’s sitemap, you can find out more here.
From this point, you can choose which post types, archives, and taxonomies you’d like to add to your sitemap in one-click.
You can include Posts, Pages, Categories, and Tags.
Add any URLs you want to include in your sitemap that isn’t a part of your default pages, posts, or custom post types. Likewise, you can exclude any posts IDs as well.
Add the URL for inclusions and post IDs for posts you’d like to exclude.
Also, include Custom URLs you’d like to exclude by entering them in.
If you have any issues with SEO, it’s important to review them and clean them up. With The Hub, checking and fixing any SEO issue can be done quickly and easily.
In the SEO Checkup area, you can access problems and get them fixed by clicking Issues.
Head over to Issues to take care of — you guessed it — issues.
This will open up a new tab in SmartCrawl’s dashboard, where you can review your SEO recommendations highlighted in yellow.
In this example, you can see that Microdata and Link Text are potential issues.
Now you can get a detailed look at each issue by clicking on the dropdown by each one. When doing so, you’ll get an Overview, Status, and a look at How to Fix.
From here, you can Ignore the issue or fix it with SmartCrawl’s recommendations.
Clicking on Add Schema Markup will get you on your way to fixing this particular issue.
Once all of the issues are resolved, they’ll be highlighted green, and you’ll be all set.
5. Control How Pages, Posts, and Custom Posts Display in Search Engines
Appearances are important — especially when it comes to SEO. You can customize your titles and meta to be more Google-friendly and easily searchable right from The Hub’s Titles & Meta section.
This section shows you the Homepage and the number of Public Post Types.
Take control of how your site appears in search engines with titles and meta descriptions.
To start setting up how your pages, posts, and custom posts appear in search engines, click on either Titles & Meta, Homepage, or Public Post Types. All three options will open up a new tab in SmartCrawl where you can start editing.
As you can see, the Homepage tab is selected.
This is all done from the Homepage section. From here, you can customize your homepage title and description.
It shows you recommendations of the number of characters to use (which will highlight in green when good), a live Google preview, and also offers other pointers (e.g. keep things simple).
An example page and description.
In this area, you can also enable OpenGraph, enhancing how your content appears when it’s shared on social media. You’re also able to enable Twitter cards and enable Indexing in one-click, which is for adjusting whether you want your site to appear in search results.
Tweak and adjust accordingly.
The set up is the same as the Homepage for editing the titles & meta for Post Types, Taxonomies, and Archives. You can get to any of these areas from the top of the page.
Adjust the title & meta in all of these categories.
You can also adjust additional settings in the Settings area, including separators (page break between variables) and character length.
6. Optimize Your WordPress Site’s Social Appearance
Control how your pages and posts appear on social media with a few clicks, leading to better engagement and traffic, from the Social tab in The Hub.
You can enable OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, and also turn on Pinterest Verification.
The social tab in The Hub has quick access to get your social SEO in check.
OpenGraph adds metadata to your pages to make them appear amazing when shared on popular social networks.
It will use your default titles, descriptions, and feature images.
To enable it, click on OpenGraph. It will open up a new tab in SmartCrawl, and you can have it functioning instantly.
OpenGraph is one-click away!
With Twitter Cards, you can add metadata to your pages to make the appearance of your posts better with rich photos, videos, and media experiences. In return, this helps drive traffic to your site.
Like OpenGraph, you can enable it in one-click. You also have the choice of including an image or not. Plus, there’s a preview of what a post will look like.
You get a nice preview of what it looks like with an image on Twitter.
Turning on Pinterest Verification will verify your website with Pinterest. This will attribute your website when your site’s content is pinned to the social platform.
It’s done by adding your website to Pinterest and copying the meta tag to SmartCrawl. Once confirmed, you’ll get a notification.
Once you’re verified, you’ll get this message.
And it will reflect that you’re connected in The Hub.
There are other ways to optimize your SEO in The Hub that you can set up quickly and easily. Here’s a rundown of what else you can do.
Automatic Linking
Set up Automatic Linking in just a couple of clicks so that it will look for keywords that match pages & posts around your WordPress site and automatically link them.
Just hit Activate to set it up.
Get started in one-click.
From here, SmartCrawl will confirm with you that you want to get started. And then, you set up what post types to allow to link to and where to insert links.
Click to link on posts, pages, comments, and also insert links, too.
You can also add Custom Links, Excluded Keywords, and Minimum & Maximum lengths, which limits the number of characters and link amounts.
Along with that, include Optional Settings like:
Allow autolinks to empty taxonomies
Prevent linking in heading tags
Process only single posts and pages
Process RSS feeds
Case sensitive matching
Prevent duplicate links
Open links in a new tab
Nofollow autolinks
A lot can be done to fine-tune your automatic linking and improve your SEO.
Schema
Schema is set up to let search engines know whether you’re an organization or a person, and then from there add all of your social profiles. This is so search engines know what social profiles to attribute your web content to.
Where you’ll set up Schema in The Hub.
There is a ton you can do with Schema. You can add your website details, logo, descriptions, corporate contacts, set up a contact page, and social media accounts.
As you can see, there’s a lot you can add to Schema.
There’s also an option to enable Google Sitelinks Search, which adds a mini search box under the main result for users to search your website directly when searching on Google.
When enabled, you can enhance a user’s search results on Google.
Beyond this, there are advanced settings and plenty more you can add, such as special pages, structured data, and author options. For more detailed information on Schema, be sure to read our documentation.
MozRank
Moz is the industry leader in SEO reports and this feature allows you to integrate with their API.
With MozRank activated, it will provide reports that tell you how your site is performing against the competition with all of the crucial SEO measurement tools, like ranking, links, and more.
From The Hub, you can click Activate to get started.
It’s easy to activate and set up an account.
You’ll have to set up an account with MozRank to get it to function. Once you have an account and enter your credentials into SmartCrawl, you’ll begin to see metrics specific to your site. Also, you’ll be able to see individual stats per post in the post editor.
The Hub has a Your Reports area, where you can automatically run SEO checkups and site crawler, followed by an email report.
It will display what reports you have activated and you can get access to them in one-click.
Your reports are accessible and easily accessed right from The Hub.
Once accessed, you can modify recipients of the reports, schedule, view SEO issues, and more.
Content Analysis
The Content Analysis area will recommend improvements to your content to give it the best ranking possible. You can see your Overall SEO Analysis and Overall Readability Analysis.
The analysis is then marked as Good or Poor and Easy, Okay, or Difficult.
Once clicking on an analysis, SmartCrawl offers some detailed information, and you can make the recommended improvements.
From here, make some improvements and your SEO will improve.
Content Analysis is a sure way to keep your SEO in good shape and improve as necessary.
Your SEO Has it All with The Hub and SmartCrawl
With The Hub and SmartCrawl, your SEO is always in check, and assessing how well it’s optimized is always just a few clicks away. Your site’s ranking will always be up to par with detailed reports, internal linking, social enhancements, and more!
And that’s not all. We’re constantly upping the SEO game and improving The Hub, so be sure to check out our Roadmap to see what’s next.
Plus, for more detailed information, you can always refer to our documentation on The Hub and SmartCrawl.
As you can see, with The Hub and SmartCrawl, your SEO has it all!
With Defender and The Hub, securing your site and keeping tabs on any volatile issues is as easy as ever – all in one place!
Any hackers up to no good, malware, or threatening bots, don’t stand a chance against our combined forces. And eliminating any potential problem can be done in a few clicks.
All of this is done in one place: The Hub’s Security panel. You can access it from the main overview in The Hub or the Security tab.
You can also make security adjustments right from the main Hub overview, too.
The Security area gives you a 360-degree look at everything on your site, from Firewall, malware detection, reporting, and more. Plus, from here, you can run all of your security operations with security scans, audits, and instantly handle security recommendations.
With quick accessibility and ease of use, you’ll see how The Hub and Defender are your answer to your site’s security.
By the time you read through this article, you’ll see how to view, handle, and keep tabs on your security in the most direct way possible.
1. Easily Run a Security Scan or Have One Scheduled
In one-click, Defender will do malware scanning of your WordPress core files for any modifications and unexpected changes. He will scan plugins, themes, and essential features on your site for suspicious code.
You can also have a more hands-off approach to security and schedule scans quickly and effortlessly.
From the Security tab, you’ll see towards the top Security.
Docs, total issues, and scanning are all in one place.
On display, it will show you the total issues. From here, you can also set up a security scan here and run a scan.
We’ll start by running a scan by clicking the Run Scan button.
Once you do this, a display will come up, notifying you of the scan’s progress. You’ll also get a notification when it’s complete if you want to leave this area in The Hub.
The progress is displayed as a percentage.
Once completed, the number of issues will appear.
Total issues are in the red box.
If you want to schedule a scan, just click Set Up under Next scheduled security scan.
It will open up a new tab and take you to the Defender dashboard’s Reporting section.
From the reporting section, you can Enable Reporting, set up to send notifications when no issues are detected, add recipients of reports, and set up a reporting schedule.
Add as many recipients as you want, adjust reports to fit your schedule, and more.
Once you run a security scan or scheduled one, it’s now time to take care of any issues.
2. Instantly Tweak Security
Below the Security box is a Recommendations area that lets you view and take care of issues. Here you’ll see the same number of issues To Action and take care of. You’ll see the number of Actioned recommendations that are already handled.
Also, enable Email Notifications from this spot. This will ensure that you don’t need to check in to ensure your security tweaks are still active.
The current PHP version and WordPress version are also on display here.
Let’s go ahead and take care of the security recommendations. By simply clicking on To Action, it will immediately take you to Defender’s dashboard in a new tab, where you can view the issues and fix them.
Each security tweak that’s recommended to fix shows up here.
By clicking on the drop-down arrow, you can view the issue in more detail and fix it accordingly.
Most of the tweaks can be resolved in one click! Or by simply indicating a timeframe.
As you can see, as they get resolved, they disappear as an issue.
Once something is a non-issue, it’s shown in the Resolved section. If for any reason, you’d like to revert that security issue to the way it was, you can do so by going into the dropdown and clicking Revert.
As you can see, there are now no issues! And reverting one is a click away.
If we hop back over to the tab with The Hub open and refresh the Security tab, you’ll see that we have resolved all of the issues. Total issues are now in a green box, actioned recommendations are now 12, and there are zero to action.
All issues are taken care of.
And just like that, you’ve beefed-up your security!
3. Set Up Tailored Security Reports Delivered Right to Your Inbox
Setting up security reports tailored to your needs is done in The Hub in the Your Reports area.
You can set up reports for Malware Detection, Firewall, and Audit Logging. Simply click on any of the security categories, and it will open a new tab in Defender’s dashboard, where you can turn on reporting with a flip of a switch.
Defender can set up all reports in this area.
As we covered already, Malware can be set up here or in the Security area (see information above). Setting this up here or in the Security section of The Hub is the same process.
With Firewall, you can get emailed regular lockout reports for your site.
To set it up, you activate the option to Send Regular Email Reports.
Now, you can add recipients to the report and set up the perfect schedule.
Flip the switch and add as many recipients of the Firewall report as you’d like.
Once you hit Save Changes, it will be all set up, and you’ll start receiving your reports on a schedule.
With Audit Logging, you’ll see first the number of events logged in the past seven days.
In this example, there were 153.
View detailed information on the events in the Events Log. From here, you can also export the data as a .CSV file and look at individual circumstances by clicking on the dropdown arrow.
All the individual logs are accessible and viewable from here.
When it comes to getting a detailed report emailed to you, like the other categories, you can do this with one-click.
Change the frequency, day of the week, and time of day when you want reports sent.
Add any recipients that you’d like and schedule the best time to send out reports. For more information on event logs, be sure to check out Defender’s documentation.
4. Get Notified (and delete) Suspicious Files
Get notifications of file changes, vulnerabilities, and injected code from The Hub’s Malware Detection area. Here, you can view the number of potentially malicious files to review and turn on email notifications for any malware issues.
In this example, you can see there are 11 files to review for malware.
When clicking on View Issues, a new tab will open in Defender’s dashboard, where it breaks down the issues into more precise details, which are if they’re in the WordPress core, from Plugins & themes, or if Suspicious Code has been determined.
As you can see, there are seven issues in the WordPress core and four suspicious codes located.
Scroll and view the Issues all in one place. You can also see each issue by clicking on the arrow dropdown, taking bulk action against them, or handling them individually. Plus, it will show the time, size (in bytes), and when the issue was added.
Scroll through the issues, click on individual ones, or take bulk action.
Delete any issues you find suspicious and take care of them. If you ever have questions about any suspicious code or malware (whether it is malicious or not, for example), contact our 24/7 support, and we can help immediately!
You can also become aware of malware issues in your inbox by clicking Email notification.
It indicates whether email notifications are on or not.
When clicking on it, it will open up a new tab in Defender. Here, you can enable email notifications in one-click, opt to send notifications when no issues are detected, add recipients, and edit email templates.
Customize the templates, add recipients, and more!
Taking care of malicious code is as easy as ever! Plus, many hackers get stopped in their tracks with Defender before even making it to your site.
5. Set Up Firewall with WAF
As mentioned above, Defender can stop anyone up to no good before they get to your site. It is accomplished with WAF, which is easily accessible in The Hub. You can protect your login area and lockout any suspicious behavior automatically.
Our WAF will also monitor all of the IP addresses and user agents attempting to access your site. It filters out traffic that is known to be unsafe or that you’ve identified as not wanted. Your site will be protected from attacks, such as cross-site request forgeries, cross-site-scripting, file inclusions, and SQL injection attacks.
In The Hub, the Firewall section shows what type of WAF protection you have. You can view logs and set it up directly from The Hub.
The type of Firewall we have up is hosted WAF.
When you click on this box, you can turn it on and enter information for:
IP Allowlist
IP Blocklist
User Agent Allowlist
User Agent Blocklist
URL Allowlist
Disabled Rule IDs
Edit and adjust the WAF exactly how you’d like.
Effortlessly change the WAF settings at any time, keeping your WordPress site in good shape as issues arise.
6. Activate Other Security Tools in One-Click
The Hub has a lot of other security tools that you can activate and use in one-click. Here’s a rundown of what else you can do.
Audit Logging
Want to track and log events that have happened on your website in a given amount of time? That’s easy to do with Audit Logging.
Simply choose between the Last 24 Hours, Last Seven Days, or Last 30-Days, and you can view your logs.
The Audit Logging also shows you the events logged in a specified timeframe.
Audit Logging ensures you’re on top of all the events in detail.
Two-Factor Authentication
To protect your login and automatically lockout any suspicious behavior, you can enable two-factor authentication.
In this area, you can also see the Status (whether it’s on or off) and enable Lost Phone authentication.
It shows that two-factor authentication and lost phone authentication is on, too.
With one-click, you can activate both two-factor authentication and lost phone.
You can also choose what users and roles need to have two-factor authentication by:
Administrator
Editor
Author
Contributor
Subscriber
Revisor
Along with all of this, you can fine-tune it all by enabling Force Authentication, adding Custom Graphics above login fields, customize two-factor emails, download the Google Authenticator, view active users, and deactivate two-factor authentication.
There is quite a bit you can customize and adjust when it comes to two-factor authentication.
Blocklist Monitor
Add Blocklist Monitoring in one-click. This will automatically check to see if you’re on Google’s blocklist every six hours.
It shows the last and upcoming check.
If there’s an issue, we’ll also notify you immediately by email.
Advanced Tools
Turn on Advanced Tools, so you have enhanced protection against even the most aggressive hackers and bots out there.
One-click activation, and you’re all set.
Once activated, a new tab will open up in Defender’s dashboard. Here, you can enable all of these features just by enabling them:
X-Frame Options
X-XSS-Protection
X-Content-Type-Options
Strict Transport
Referrer Policy
Feature Policy
Each feature has a detailed description of precisely what it does.
With these enabled, you’re set for advanced protection!
There’s No Sub for Security with The Hub
When you combine The Hub and Defender, you can rest easy knowing your site is safe. There’s no sub for security against bots, hackers, and other potential threats.
And with The Hub’s ease of accessibility and instant security tweaks, you’re always in the know if any issues do arise and can handle them with a click or two – or automatically with email notifications.
Plus, if you ever need help, it’s always available 24/7 with our support superheroes.
Whether you or your client runs a cafe, boutique, hair salon, a place of worship, or practically any business or organization, with the help of our 5-star rated plugin, Forminator, you can track & trace and help manage COVID-19.
We’ve developed an easy-to-implement track and trace template that you can use or add to your clients’ websites using Forminator.
It works by collecting personal data to slow the spread, following government guidelines.
Forminator is masked-up and ready for you and your clients to track and trace!
This straight-forward tutorial will show you how to set up and implement a track and trace form in just a few minutes (or less).
We’ll be going over:
How to Quickly Set Up a Track and Trace Form
Easily Keep Track of Check-ins
Using a QR Code to Link to Form
How to Quickly Set Up a Track and Trace Form
Creating a track and trace form can be created and published with just a few steps.
From Forminator’s dashboard, create a new form to get started.
You’re one click away from a new form.
For this form, a blank template will do. Give it a name, and then you’re ready to add Fields.
This simple form just needs the essential fields for track and trace information. We’re suggesting to add the fields for:
Name
Phone Number
Email
Number
Datepicker
GDPR
Add any additional fields that you’d like.
Hit Insert Fields when you have all of the fields you’d like to include ready. You can always add or remove fields at any time past this point.
Some of the information we want to have mandatory before a user can submit the form. To do that, just go to the individual fields required to be filled out, click on Settings, and select the Required option.
Add the mandatory option to as many fields as you’d like.
Once you make it required, a little red Asterisk appears next to that field. In this track and trace form, we have the name, number, and date. The GDPR is automatically set up as a required field.
We’re also going to want to change the text to some of these fields.
To start with, the Number field will have the caption Number of people in your party. For the Date field, we’ll add the text Date visiting. And finally, instead of Send Message, we’ll change that to Check-in in the Send Message field (automatically included in the form).
To do this, simply click on the field, and under the Labels tab, type in any text that you want to include.
You can also add a custom placeholder, default value, and description.
Arrange the fields any way you want. Forminator’s drag and drop feature makes it a breeze.
Have several fields on one line or separate – the choice is yours!
Once you have the form sorted, hit Preview to get a glimpse of what it looks like.
With a preview, you may notice some changes you want to make.
When it comes to the GDPR, you can change the text inside the Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions by clicking on Labels in the field.
Since this form is designed solely for COVID-19 track and trace, you must follow protocol and legal guidance set forth by your local governing body for the collection of personal data, ensuring compliance with GDPR.
Some good points to include in the GDPR can consist of:
Stating that this form maintains a minimum amount of data for the shortest duration of time as possible.
Ensuring customers are informed about how the data is used and secured safely.
That data is deleted securely after the duration set and limit the use of the data.
Information about following all legal obligations by law, for example, GDPR in the EU, or specific advice set out by your governing body (you are solely responsible for this).
Another feature to include on this form is the user’s message displayed once the form is submitted.
Under Edit Form>Behavior, you can quickly change the Inline Message to something along the lines of Thank you for checking-in.
Create any personalized message that you’d like.
You can also integrate the form with the most popular 3rd party apps, such as MailChimp. We have some detailed information about doing that with Forminator in this article.
If there’s nothing else to do with your form and you have all the text edited, GDPR information included, and your form looks good, you’re ready to publish and start the track and trace process.
When you hit Publish, Forminator provides you with a shortcode that you can paste into any page, post, or acceptable widget in WordPress.
When Forminator gives you the thumbs-up, your track and trace form is ready for use.
Easily Keep Track of Submissions
You can easily access the information in Forminator’s dashboard by clicking View Stats under the form’s name to view submissions and keep tabs on tracking and tracing.
Click on the little icon to view stats.
From here, Submissions are just a click away.
You’ll see all of the submissions that have been made by Date Submitted, Name, Email Address, and the additional fields. Plus, you have options to export the submissions, delete entries, search by date, search by keyword, and get detailed information.
All the form submissions are in one place.
To view more detailed information, including what’s on the additional fields, click the dropdown by each name.
All the detailed information is accessible here.
Also, you can set up email notifications that will go to you and anyone that checks-in.
Simply go to Edit Form and Email Settings. Here, you can add a customized message, choose which admin email notifications get sent to, and edit how you’d like the email to appear to users.
Use the form data dropdown to add data to the body of your email.
You’re now all set to track and trace with all the necessary data needed.
The Kaya QR Code Generator is one of many options.
It functions by creating QR codes through a widget or a shortcode, so you can easily insert it into any page, post, or sidebar.
You can browse through numerous QR Code plugins here and find the best one that works for you and your client.
Ace the Track and Trace
With the help of Forminator, you can ace the track and trace. As you can see, it’s quick, easy to manage, and free to do. Your clients will benefit and it can help slow the spread.
Collecting leads has never been as much fun! Thanks to our free 5-star plugin, Forminator, you can now create engaging quizzes and capture emails simultaneously.
Plus, you can easily manage your leads, integrate the emails with a 3rd party app (like Mailchimp, Aweber, etc.), automatically run submission reports, and more!
Quizzes are highly engaging, can offer personalized feedback, are interactive, and entertaining. Combine all of these elements with Forminator –the best form builder for WordPress– and you have a powerful and creative way to generate leads in just a few simple steps.
You’ll have your lead generating quiz up quickly and added to your WordPress site in no time.
So…
I think that’s the best answer, too.
1. Set Up a Quiz in Forminator to Gather Leads
It takes only a switch of a button to get the lead generator feature on your next quiz.
From the Forminator dashboard, simply click Create, name the quiz, and pick whether you want to create a knowledge or personality quiz. When you hit Continue, activate the option for collecting email leads in one-click.
One-click and your quiz is primed for collecting leads.
It’s that simple! There’s nothing more to get your lead generating quiz started.
From here, you’re ready to…
2. Customize the Default Lead Generation Form to Your Specifications
When it comes to adjusting your quiz, you’ll see all of the available options in the Edit section of the dashboard.
When you’re in this section, the Lead Generation Form area is where you can customize the default lead generation form. To edit, just click on the pencil in the container that shows the quiz’s name, and it will open up in a new tab.
This example is named ‘Test Quiz.’
When you open the new tab, you’ll find the default fields are already in place. These include:
HTML
Email Address
First Name
GDPR
These fields are an excellent start for creating a quiz with lead generation.
Add as many fields as you feel are necessary by clicking Insert Fields. Also, adjust the default ones by clicking on each area’s gear icon.
With Forminator’s drag-and-drop functionality, you can arrange the fields any way you want. Also, delete any fields with one-click.
When it comes to editing the rest of the form, you’ll notice that Email Notifications and Integrations are locked. That’s because these are shared settings between the quiz and form modules. They’re configured back in the quiz editor (which we’ll get to in a moment).
You can’t access Email Notifications or Integrations from here.
Everything else is accessible and editable.
In the Appearance section, you can pick the form container’s design style, change colors of separate areas, use custom fonts, create an optional border, adjust the spacing, and even add custom CSS.
Blue? Bold? Want a new font? You can do it all from here.
Choose what you want to happen after a form is successfully submitted in the Submission Behavior section.
In terms of validation, you decide if you want validation checks when the user submits the form using Ajax (which is recommended). The live method will inspect fields at the same time as the user fills them out.
Plus, you can enable inline validation with one-click.
Also, the Submission Indicator can be activated to show a loader on your form until it’s submitted.
Choose your validation method and whether you’d like a submission indicator to be displayed.
You can enable autofill, boost security by enabling Honeypot protection & enabling logged in submissions only, and set the life span of the form for submissions.
We’ll add some added protection to this quiz with Honeypot.
In the Settings area, it’s possible to disable the store submissions in your database.
Also, determine how long you want to retain the form’s submission form by the number of days, customize how you’d like to handle erasure requests, and, if your form contains files, decide if the file gets deleted with deleted submissions.
Customize exactly how long you want to retain your form’s submission and more.
The global privacy settings can also be accessed from here, where you can adjust however you’d like.
When clicking the global privacy settings, it opens up in a new tab, and you can adjust.
You’ll also notice that the status is Published. That’s because when created, it’s automatically connected to the quiz module.
The status tells you it’s published.
Since it’s published, all you need to do is save any changes by clicking on Update.
Clicking update will save all of your changes.
You can adjust the settings at any time if you ever need to make changes.
3. Adjust the Quiz Module Editor
Now that we have the default lead generation form set up, you can hop back over to the tab that has the quiz editor, and you’ll be able to adjust additional settings.
In the Leads section, you’ll notice that you now have Form Placement and Skip Form options.
You now have two more areas to adjust since editing the default lead generation form.
Form Placement is where you want to embed the lead generation form. You can choose between the beginning of the quiz or before showing the results.
If you want to give users the option to skip the form, you can enable the Skip Form feature.
Enter a customized message when you enable the Skip Form feature.
You can configure the Appearance and Behavior of the quiz, too. For help with this, please refer to our documentation on Appearance and Behavior.
4. Setting Up Email Notifications and Integrations
We can now get back into the Email Notifications and Integrations area since we set up the lead generation default. They were locked, but are now accessible. This is where we’ll set up email notifications every time a user opts into the quiz.
In the Email Notifications area, set up the Admin Notification and Participant’s Notification.
The admin’s email is also displayed here.
In terms of setting up, both of these fields function the same.
You can edit the message to the admin & participants that will go out after opting in, edit what emails the message goes out to, create advanced customizations with the email (e.g. CC & BCC), and add conditions.
Customize email notifications the way you want them.
Plus, in our new form data dropdown list, you can add quiz and form data in the body of your emails.
Add any specific piece of data in the emails that you’d like.
If you have any 3rd party apps integrated with Forminator, you can connect them in the Integrations area. Just click on the plus sign, and that particular app will walk you through on how to connect.
Easily sync your quiz up with MailChimp, Zapier, and more!
Once connected, you can start collecting the quiz’s data with any supported integrated app.
5. Implement Quizzes on Your WordPress Site
Once you have your quiz set up the way you’d like, hit Publish. Then, Forminator will give you a shortcode that you can use on any post, page, or acceptable widget.
Forminator hands over the shortcode as quick as that.
Simply copy and paste the code, and that’s it. Your quiz is now ready to collect leads!
6. Easily Viewing Submissions
Viewing and monitoring submissions is quick and easy. The Quizzes dashboard gives you an immediate glimpse of activity.
You can see when the last submission was made, the number of submissions in the last 30 days, and easily access the submissions for a specific quiz.
You can create a new quiz, view submissions, and edit quizzes in Forminator’s dashboard.
To see submissions from a specific quiz, locate the name of the quiz, tap on the gear icon, and then View Submissions.
View submissions and much more from the gear icon.
Once you click View Submissions, Forminator brings up all the submissions to that particular quiz. It shows the submission date & time, email address, first name, and information from other fields you included.
The submissions are also numbered by the submission date.
By clicking on the dropdown on individual submissions, you can view detailed information, quiz results, and any details on 3rd party integrations.
All of the field information is displayed here and quiz results.
Want to download the data? That’s a click away.
Click on Export and you can download a CSV file. Plus, you can apply submission filters and schedule exports by specific times, making them automatically emailed directly to you.
Manually or schedule exporting the data.
Q: What’s the Best Lead Generating Quiz Maker Out There?
A: With a 5-star rating and many tens of thousands of active downloads, we have to side with our four-eyed friend as the best lead generating quiz maker because he makes it quick, easy, and free to do.
Plus, Forminator can create contact & registration forms, collect payments, make polls, perform calculations, and much more. He’s continuously updated, thanks to Forminator’s awesome team of developers and designers.
With The Hub 2.0, you can give unlimited users multiple roles — even if they aren’t WPMU DEV members! All of this can be easily set up in a matter of minutes, allowing you the flexibility to give users access to as much or as little as you’d like on your WordPress site.
Plus, With The Hub Client, you can create your Hub for your clients and collaborators, using your branding.
Oh, and did we mention it’s all free for your users and you’re able to be set up in minutes?
This post’s features are accomplished from the Users & Roles tab in The Hub dashboard, except for The Hub Client, accessed by the Hub Client Plugin (which I’ll show you how to activate).
1. Easily Set Up Users
You can create new users in The Hub, allowing them to access specific areas on your WordPress site. Creating new users in The Hub is the easiest way to allow access to users because everything is done from one place.
Click the Users tab and Add First User to get started.
Creating new users is perfect for collaborations with other users.
From here, you’ll enter their email. Then, you can select sites that they’ll have access to (all the sites that you have with WPMU DEV are shown in the dropdown), and the user role to view, edit, or custom role (which can be modified and changed at any time).
Clicking on Invite will notify the new user with a confirmation email.
Once that user gets the email and hits Confirm, the user will be redirected to WPMU DEV to set up a free account with their email, name, and password.
They don’t even need to be a WPMU DEV member. And again, there’s no cost for the users. The only cost would be if the new user wants to upgrade to a WPMU DEV membership of their own.
There are only three fields to fill out for a new user to get set up.
When they click Join – that’s it!
A new user is added and will have access to the sites and roles determined by the admin when invited.
From the admin point of view, they can then see their new user in the Users area. If the invited user accepts, it will show Active in the status. If the user hasn’t confirmed yet, it will show Pending.
All your users are shown in one spot in The Hub.
It also displays the user’s email, role, sites that the user has access to, and status.
Add as many users as you’d like by clicking on the New User button.
Setting up a user can be done with the tap of a button.
As you can see, creating and organizing users takes no time at all.
2. Setting Up Roles in Just a Few Clicks
When you send a person an invite to be part of the team, you also add user roles. Roles are what determines which access capabilities users have.
The predetermined roles that are initially available are:
View & Edit
View Only
You can pick between these two or create your own.
Create your own role under Roles by clicking on New custom user role.
All the available roles will be displayed here.
Name the new role anything you’d like and customize accordingly. Let’s check out how to customize it by…
3. Adding User Customization Settings
Customizing access for a role can be determined by clicking on all the available options (e.g. sites, security settings, SEO, etc). Also, choose to have View & Edit or View Only for sites.
You decide what to include in this new role.
The Custom option gives you detailed task descriptions about specific roles that each option can allow.
As an example, here are various tasks you can include for Plugins in this new role. Click on the options you want the user to have the capability to manage.
Allow this role to uninstall plugins, activate plugins, and more.
Once you have the new tasks determine, click Save, and you’re all set.
With roles determined, the ability to assign them is all in one place. Everything under Role shows what that user has access to.
As you can see, the current role is View & Edit – All.
Want to change roles? Customize what sites they have access to and switch roles accordingly by clicking on the roles and what sites you want the user to have access to.
Once updated, the user will have the roles that you applied to them.
And like all things in The Hub, you can edit anything whenever you want.
4. Gain Quick Access to Sites
You have instant access to view your sites and how many users each site has in the Sites tab. The Sites tab makes it quick and easy to view and edit roles for specific sites.
All the websites are displayed here with the number of users displayed next to the site’s name.
You can also click the arrow to sort by name or number.
Hover over the number to bring up all the users for that site.
For this site, there’s one user and one role.
Click on the plus sign by the site’s name to manage the user’s access.
Clicking the plus site will lead you to edit a user’s access.
This shows who has access and whether they’re active or not. Uncheck the user to remove access and add a new user from here, too.
Want to remove access for someone? Click on the green checkmark and that user won’t be able to access any longer.
You can also resend an invitation to a pending user from this section.
5. Set Up The Hub Client
The Hub Client has arrived so that you can personalize The Hub the way you want it.
With The Hub Client, you can provide access to clients, collaborators, and users using your personalized white label Hub. It’s your own Hub, the way you and your organization want it, customized to your perfection.
To use The Hub Client plugin, you have to be connected with The Hub to access its API. You can see how to do that here.
When connected to The Hub, the Hub Client plugin can be downloaded from the White Label page and then clicking on Find out more about The Hub Client.
One-click on White Label, and you’re there.
Once downloaded and installed, you’ll get a welcome message.
Welcome to the Hub Client!
The welcome message can walk you through everything on getting started by, you guessed it – clicking Get Started.
Begin by changing your name to replace WPMU DEV by clicking on the title and entering whatever you’d like.
We’ll just call this one Dev Man.
Replace the WPMU DEV logo with your own by uploading an image in the Your Logo section (e.g. Dev Man).
A cartoon Dev Man will do for this example.
You can change the colors for the Navigation background, Navigation text, and Navigation text selected & hover in the Color scheme area. Do this by visually picking the colors or by color number (e.g. #FFFFFF for white).
Pick and choose appropriate colors that fit your branding.
Head over to the Configuration to select a pre-made menu to appear after Sites.
Configure the menu how you’d like.
And for the client page, you can set up any page you’d like to replace your client hub. All the pages you have in your WordPress site will appear in the dropdown menu.
Choose a specific page to replace ‘hub.’
For example, I created a page called Client Login that I’m going to use for my clients to log in at.
We’ll use this page as an example.
And now, when your users log in, they’ll be greeted with your branding, colors, and configurations.
What the user login area now looks like.
That’s how you have your own completely white-labeled Hub Client organization (yippee!).
So, let’s set up…
6. Users & Roles & The Hub Client
Your colleagues, users, and clients can now log in and use your very own branded WordPress site and customized Hub with The Hub Client. The Hub Client includes controlling all user access levels and roles.
It has to be activated and running to do this, so be sure to read through the section in this article on setting up The Hub Client first.
Once The Hub Client is ready, adding, and setting up users & roles is all accessible in The Hub Client > Users & Roles.
All of your users will be displayed instantly.
This section is precisely how Users & Roles are set up in The Hub, except the Setting tab.
The Hub has the Settings tab, and The Hub Client has a Terms of Service & Privacy tab, so you can edit and set your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
You can easily add a new client or user by clicking the New User box.
Add as many new users as you’d like.
Once clicking on that, you’ll fill out the new user’s email address, grant site access, and select the user’s role.
Three simple steps will get a new user set up.
The user will get an email invitation to join. Once confirmed, they’ll appear in your Users & Roles admin as active.
When you have your users in the system, you can manage their access to websites. All you do is click on the individual, and a pop-up will appear where you can select Access to Selected Websites or Access All Websites.
If you choose Access to Selected Websites, you can remove or add sites that the individual can access in one-click.
The blue checkmark means the user can access it.
Create a new role in the Roles tab. Plus, see what User Roles are already set up. (For more on New Roles, please see the Add User Customization Settings).
Have a new role you want to create? Get one set up in a minute or less.
To quickly view your websites, view users for each site, and add or remove users from your site, go to Sites.
Click on a number to view the users for a particular site.
With the Users & Roles in the Hub Client, you’ll have your clients up-and-running in your white-labeled Hub in minutes. All accessible right from the dashboard in your WordPress site.
You can add an unlimited amount of collaborators and users with access to WPMU DEV products, plugins, and support.
There is No Sub for The Hub
As you can see, adding users & roles and creating your Hub for you and your clients is doable in just a few clicks. There’s just no other substitute out there for an all-in-one CMS when it comes to managing your WordPress sites.
And if you think this is good, just wait. Coming soon, we’re including automated site creation & client billing, making your white label Hub your own SaaS business!
There are many reasons why you might want to add a map to your WordPress site. Do you have a shop and want to display your location? Or maybe you’re into real estate and need to show your latest listings. Whatever the reason, adding a map to WordPress is easy to do.
Like a good map, we’ll guide you through how to do it. You can add a Google Map manually or create one with the help of a plugin.
First, I’ll show you the costs of getting a Google API and how to obtain one. Most of the Google map plugins I’ll be covering in this tutorial require a Google API.
Next, I’ll show you how to get the embed code directly from Google Maps without a plugin.
And finally, I’ll be going through 12 plugins that can fit the bill. Each one is a bit different. Some of the features may be more appealing to you than others.
All of the plugins are free to activate and use, but some offer upgrade options for even more advancements.
Dev Man mapping out his next plugin.
Now that we have this article mapped-out, let’s begin…
Must I Buy an API?
Don’t worry. Chances are it won’t cost you anything. But, it’s worth going over this in case you want to use Google Maps with a plugin.
Having an API key has been a requirement for Google Maps since June 11, 2018. You can see in their pricing table below what that looks like when you obtain one.
The Google API costs vary by use.
One thing Google does is gives you a recurring $200 credit on your billing account each month. That offsets your usage costs, so unless you’re making quite a few requests (like, a ton), using Google Maps shouldn’t cost you a dime. Whew!
So now that you’re not freaked out about the costs, let’s…
From that point, you need to select or create a project. It walks you through on setting one up or just pick from a project that’s already available.
You’ll have to set up billing information – but again – don’t freak out. You won’t have to worry too much about being billed, though, unless you go past the threshold of high usage limits. If you do, you’ll get charged accordingly.
After your billing information is entered, it will now ask you to pick one or more products.
Google gives you quite a few map options.
Your choice will vary depending on what type of map you’ll be using. Since we’ll be going over how to embed a map without a plugin next, we’ll go with the Maps Embed API.
Want an embedded map? Go with this option.
From here, you’ll click Enable.
Enabling the map is one click away.
Enable will take you to the APIs & Services dashboard.
Here is where you create your API key. Click on Credentials and then Create Credentials.
All of your API keys will be displayed on the dashboard once created, so you can retrieve them at any time.
Like that, you have created an API key. You’ll need the API key for many of the plugins that we’ll be going over.
Something to keep in mind is that it will show in plain text in your source code when embedding your Google Maps API key. You’ll want to restrict this so that people can’t use your API key on their WordPress sites. That can cause your usage to skyrocket if it gets in the wrong hands.
Doing this is easy. You’ll just click on your API key’s name to set up restrictions. Simply adding your WordPress site referrer should do the trick (e.g. https://yourdomain.com/). By doing this, it will restrict usage to just your site.
Enter the website that you will be using this key for.
Now you’re ready to use any plugin that requires a Google API. So, let’s go ahead and look at…
Embedding a Google Map into WordPress
If you feel like going plugin-free and just adding a map by embedding it from Google Maps, that’s easy to do.
Google can also add a precise location for whatever you want to display, show detailed information about a business, and more.
To demonstrate how it works, we’ll just set up a basic map of Los Angeles, California (hey, my neck of the woods!) to embed.
We’ll just head over to Google Maps and pull up the Los Angeles area. Zoom in or get as close to the location as you wish.
Los Angeles is a pretty big place…
You’ll then click on the three little lines in the upper left corner. This provides you with a dropdown. From this point, you’ll click on Share or embed map.
Have the map sized the way you want? Click on Share or embed map.
Once you do that, you’ll have options to send a link or embed a map. Plus, you can choose what size you’d like the map to be (e.g. medium).
You can determine various sizes for the map that suits your site best.
From here, you’ll simply copy and paste the HTML in your WordPress post, page, or acceptable widget, and that’s it! Your map will be displayed.
12 Map Plugins for WordPress
Let’s say you want to do much more with your map, other than just what Google Maps provides. You want some options, dammit! Well, that’s where plugins can help.
Here’s a look at 12 map plugins that might be beneficial to tweak your map to your standards.
MapPress Maps for WordPress
For attractive looking interactive Google or Leaflet maps, the Mapress Maps plugin is a great free option.
It features multisite compatibility, markers that can be drag & drop, and is street view supported. Plus, you can set many parameters, such as width, height, zoom, and more.
If you upgrade to their Pro version, you get additional functionality, such as custom icons, mashup options, and a map widget to show a map or a mashup.
WP Google Maps
As the name suggests, WP Google Maps is for Google maps that you can add to your WordPress posts and pages quickly and easily with a shortcode. This is the most popular Google Maps plugin out there, with over 400K active installations.
You can create as many maps as you’d like by typing in the address. It also has nine popular map themes to choose from, drag map markers, fullscreen map functionality, etc.
You can upgrade to the Pro version if you’d like to create maps that give your visitors directions and add categories and other advanced features.
Maps Widgets for Google Maps
The Maps Widgets for Google Maps allows you to have a map with a thumbnail & lightbox set up in a matter of minutes. It can load the entire Google map in only one request rather than the twenty-some requests that many other Google maps plugins take to load them.
Some of the features are custom Google map sizes, map types (e.g. road map), color schemes, and custom map pin icon.
With a solid 4.5-star review and over 80K active installations, it’s a free option that’s worth setting up on your WordPress site to try out for yourself.
Ultimate Maps by Supsystic
If you’d like to use something beyond Google maps, the Supsystic Ultimate Maps plugin might be perfect for you. It uses alternative map options, such as Bing Maps, OpenStreetMap, Leaflet, Mapbox, and Thunderforest.
It features a map builder and unlimited markers with description, links, images, videos, and more. It’s also fully responsive and 100% customizable.
The ease of use and map options beyond Google make this 5-star rated plugin an option to check out.
Some of the features include a live preview editor, unlimited markers by address or drag and drop, and location search.
When it comes to style, there are over 100 icons with different colors available, 3D map shapes, ten styles to choose from, and more.
There are also tutorials and support from the Mapbox GL JS experts.
Leaflet Map
The Leaflet Map plugin works by generating a map with LeafletJS, which is an opensource JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps.
This plugin uses a shortcode to create maps, look up addresses, the longitude and latitude, and more.
It’s a very basic plugin, but with a 5-star review, it seems to do the trick for many users.
Interactive Geo Maps
The Interactive Geo Maps plugin is great if you want to add an interactive map to your WordPress site. There are over 250 maps available with regions and colored markers.
This plugin works great for travel bloggers, office locations, statistics, and more.
The Interactive Geo Maps are free for the limited version. If you’d like to upgrade to include custom images and vector icons, you can upgrade to the Pro version.
Google Maps Easy
Want to set up a map quickly and easily? Google Maps Easy has you covered. You can have a Google Map set up in a minute.
It features Google Map markers with any media. That includes video, images, links, and text descriptions.
It’s great for real estate, contact pages, delivery routes, and more.
This plugin is also 100% customizable, fully responsive, and can use an unlimited number of map markers & locations.
WP Store Locator
The WP Store Locator plugin is an easy to map plugin for – you guessed it – store locations. You’ll be able to pinpoint your location to customers and send them the right way.
The plugin allows you to customize the map’s appearance, provide custom labels for entry fields, and users can filter the results by radius. There are also driving directions to nearby stores.
The number of stores you can add is unlimited. Plus, you can include details, such as phone number, email, URL, descriptions, hours of operation, etc.
WP Google Map
With the WP Google Map plugin, you can add a custom Google map to your WordPress site. It’s totally customizable and free.
There is no coding required, and adjustments are easy to make. You can change the width, zoom levels, and add a shortcode to an acceptable widget.
Flexible Map
With Flexible Map, you can add Google Maps to your WordPress website easily with shortcodes.
Some of the features include optional descriptions and directions. You can also load a map by center coordinates, street address, and URL to a Google Earth KML file.
Stellar Places
A newer plugin is the Stellar Places. It’s designed for creating, managing, and displaying locations using Google Maps.
When you have a new place added, you can access the listing view and single location view. Both options automatically have maps associated with them. It also features a live map view, drag & drop marker relocation, unlimited locations & maps, and clean, well-written code that won’t bog down your WordPress site.
A significant difference between the Stellar Places plugin and many other plugins is that it uses custom post types to manage locations. Plus, most don’t have an intuitive interface.
That’s a Wrap When it Comes to a Map
From getting an API key to creating awesome maps with a plugin, you should be able to add a map to your WordPress site in a snap.
It really depends on your purpose for displaying a map to determine what route works best for you. The options, customization, and usability come in many different forms.
I hope this article has helped you map out a few ideas. Just follow the directions above and you’ll be good to go.
If you have a WordPress site, there’s a good chance you welcome giving your users the option to comment on a blog, register for information, send you an email, or something else. It’s great to have folks communicate with you, but this also opens the door to (gulp!) spam.
Unfortunately, spam comes with the territory, as the WordPress CMS is so popular, it naturally attracts an increased number of troublemakers looking to hack or wreak havoc on your site.
If not dealt with, it can become like swatting mosquitoes away from your WordPress site — annoying and challenging to control.
Dev Man’s swatting powers demonstrated while on a website without spam protection.
Luckily, there are plugins out there that can come to your rescue and defend your site against spammers, ensuring that only real users you want to connect with get through.
We’ll be looking at 15 top-rated plugins that can help you fight against spam—keeping real engagement flowing and kicking any spammer attempts to the curb.
Each plugin has specific features, and they’re all different. Take your pick. You might want to use just one or combine them as part of a full-proof spam protection strategy.
We’ll also look at ways to combat spam from your WordPress dashboard without a plugin.
15 Top-Rated Anti-Spam Plugins
1. Akismet
Akismet filters through the comments on your blog and marks any suspicious-looking one as spam. When they’re spotted, the comments will be sent to the spam section of the WordPress admin’s comments page.
To use Akismet, you need to get an Akismet.com API key. Keys are free for personal blogs, and there are paid subscriptions available for businesses and commercial WordPress sites. So, depending on what kind of operation you have set up, you can choose accordingly.
With over 5 million active installations, it’s the most popular combat against spam.
2. Defender
Our free Defender plugin is our answer to security and can quickly put the smackdown on spammers. With his powerful firewall, you can block hackers or bots before reaching your site with his defense.
He has IP banning, IP lockouts, 404 detections, the capability of automatically identifying bad acting IPs, and much more. Therefore, you can eliminate spam and anyone up to no good before they have a chance even to reach your website.
With a solid 5-star review and popular with over 30K active users, you’ll want to have Defender in your corner to stop spammers in their tracks.
Instead of relying on visitors to prove they’re genuine users with CAPTCHA, the WordPress Zero Spam plugin makes spam bots jump through hoops so your users can enjoy a better user experience. After all, let’s face it, CAPTCHA can be complicated.
It uses AI in combination with effective spam detection techniques and a database of known malicious IPs from across the globe to detect and block spammers.
It can also integrate with popular 3rd party apps, such as Contact Form 7, BuddyPress, WPForms, and more.
Plus, it’s completely free to use.
4. NoSpamNX
NoSpamNX blocks comment spam by creating a field that only bots can see. Then, once bots fill it out, the comment is not published and can either be blocked or completely moved into the spam queue.
Instead of relying on CAPTCHA or calculations to defend you against automated bots, NoSpamNX automatically adds additional form fields to your comment form that are invisible to human users.
When a spambot blindly fills these fields out, the comment doesn’t get saved. Then, you can decide whether to block the spambots or mark them as spam.
5. Stop Spammers
A useful plugin that blocks many forms of spam so you can use fewer plugins is Stop Spammers. This plugin helps block comment and registration spam, spam email, and spambots while also monitoring your login attempts.
It also features over 50 + configuration options for maximum personalization.
Stop Spammers works right away once installed without much to adjust. However, if you’d like more options, there is a Stop Spammers Premium option.
6. FV Antispam
FV Antispam is a powerful and straightforward plugin that moves any spambot comments directly into the trash. It works with Akismet by combatting bot spam while Akismet combats human spam.
It’s a great solution, partially because of the low CPU load. It doesn’t burden your hosting or slow down your server, unlike many other effective antispam plugins.
7. CleanTalk Spam Protection
CleanTalk is a universal antispam plugin. It blocks all bots from the forms on your site. That includes comment and registration spam, along with spam that comes through other forms on your site (e.g. bookings, shopping carts, widgets, etc.).
The one thing it won’t do is block manual spam; however, you’ll see a nice reduction in spam, considering most spam is created with bots. Plus, this plugin scans your site for preexisting spam.
It also includes a firewall, which helps prevent your site from DDoS and XML-RPC attacks.
8. Antispam Bee
Antispam Bee puts the sting on spam by blocking spam comments and trackbacks effectively, without CAPTCHA, and without distributing personal information to 3rd party services.
This free plugin will also schedule spam to be deleted and view stats on the blocked and deleted spam.
It’s one of the more popular options for combatting spam, with over 500K active users and a solid 5-star rating.
9. Titan Anti-Spam & Security
The Titan Anti-Spam & Security plugin has quite a few awesome features to prevent spam; it includes a firewall, antispam, malware scanner, site accessibility checking, and security & threats audits.
It doesn’t use CAPTCHA and includes an algorithm that ensures reliability and accuracy against spambots. It’s very well updated, and it always meets new versions of CMS.
10. Spam Destroyer
Spam Destroyer stops automated spam from bots that are sent to your default WordPress comment form. They make it as effortless as possible to use, because once you install it, it’s ready to go. It’s intended as a drop-in solution with no settings or configuration required.
For a free, simple, and easy to use plugin, Spam Destroyer is a great option.
11. WPBruiser
WPBruiser is a security and antispam plugin that is based on algorithms that identify spam bots without any captcha images.
It takes care of spambot signups, spam comments, and brute force attacks. What’s great is it can stop bots from leaving spam in the first place, eliminating the need to go through and deleting spam manually.
It also integrates with numerous plugins, including Jetpack, Epoch, Postmatic, and more.
12. Analytics Spam Blocker
The Analytics Spam Blocker works a bit differently than our previous plugins that have been mentioned, where it stops spam bots from reaching your site, so the traffic isn’t accounted for in your Google Analytics data. That means that you should only see genuine traffic reflected in your analytics.
A nice feature is you can also easily report referral spam domains with the Analytics Spam Blocker reporting tool.
13. Bad Behavior
The Bad Behavior plugin blocks all incoming traffic from spambots so they can’t access your site. Therefore, it acts as a gatekeeper so that spammers can’t even get to the point of leaving spam.
Bad Behavior is set up to work alongside existing spam blocking services to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. So, if you choose to activate a few spam blocking plugins, this can be an excellent addition to include.
It has features such as limiting the login attempts when logging in by IP address or subnet, custom login URLs, Cerber anti-spam engine, etc.
All the features that this plugin provides is worth checking out. With a 5-star rating and over 100K downloads, it’s a popular choice.
15. Stop WP Comment Spam
As the name suggests, the Stop WP Comment Spam plugin helps fight spam by automatically detecting comment spam. It does all of this without using annoying questions, quizzes, or CAPTCHA.
All that you need to do to get it working is to install it. This plugin features a free trial, and then there is an option to upgrade to the Pro version, which has features such as protecting your contact forms, the ability to stop fake user registration, run reports, and more.
3 Quick Tricks to Stopping Spam in the WordPress Dashboard
As you can see, to stop spam in your comment section, you have a wide range of plugins at your disposal.
There’s also a way to combat spam directly from the WordPress dashboard.
So, here’s a look at three ways to combat manual spam when a plugin might not be enough or when you want some added protection.
1. Make Users Register
One thing that may help is to make users register. Many drive-by spammers will not want to go to the trouble of registering to leave a quick spam comment. After all, they’re pretty lazy.
Go to Settings > Discussion > Other comment settings and check the box to make users register.
You’ll check the little box and be all set.
Some bots can attempt to register at your site, and while some may be successful, others will not. So even if some use automated software for registrations, it still puts up a wall that will work at least some of the time.
And if you notice a specific IP address causing trouble, you can block it with, for example, our Defender plugin.
The other thing to consider, of course, is your non-spamming visitors. If forced to register, users may go away. You’ll need to make a judgment call if registration is right for you.
2. Close Comments on Older Posts
Another way to combat spam is to shut the comment section down after a certain amount of time. Shutting down the comments can make sense if you have a highly publicized blog when published, and traffic dies down after a certain amount of time.
Go to Settings > Discussion > Other comment settings and check the box to close older articles’ comments.
From here, you can choose how many days old a post needs to be before shutting down comments.
Not all, but lots of spammers like to leave links on pages at least somewhat related to whatever it is they’re trying to promote. You may have posts that fit that bill, but when you close comments down after a certain amount of days, then the possibility of having comments open on such a post shrinks dramatically.
If you close comments after 14 days and a spammer finds a post from two months ago via search, the comments on that post will be closed by the time they arrive.
Just keep in mind that doing this may hurt non-spamming visitors. Some may want to leave comments on older posts.
That said, most older posts tend not to get many comments. Folks see that the post has some age, and the flow of initial comments has either slowed considerably or stopped altogether.
If you like this method but worry about closing down comments to genuine visitors, you could extend the time allowed for comments.
3. Hold Comments with Links
This setting lets you hold comments with a certain amount of links in the body of the comment.
Go to Settings > Discussion > Comment Moderation and set the number of links you’d like to allow.
Want to hold a comment if it has two or more links? No problem!
You can decide how many links should trigger a hold here. Two is the default, but you could change that to one (or anything else).
Keep in mind, changing it to zero will hold all comments. That could get very time consuming to shuffle through them all in that setting.
Like That, Your Spam is Stopped
With all 15 anti-spam plugins mentioned in this post and ways to tweak your WordPress dashboard manually, you should easily combat spam on your site. Your WordPress site will be spam-free before you know it!
Spammers will be moving on to more vulnerable locations, leaving you more time to focus on actual users on your site and less annoyed.
Just when you thought we were done making The Hub better (okay, we’re never done), we spiced it up even further with custom labels and language translations!
Languages and labels give you even more options to set up The Hub to your specifications in just a few clicks.
This cool new feature allows you to translate The Hub into other languages, color-code your websites, and filter your sites by categories & labels so you can sort through them with ease.
Dev Man brushing-up on his languages and label colors.
Why did we add these features?
Simple. Because based on our survey — you wanted it! And, well, we did, too. We’re pretty fond of new features here.
Here’s a quick break-down on what’s new…
Your Language Preferences Await
It’s essential to read all that’s presented to you in The Hub without translating it. That’s why we’ve now made it simple and easy to change your language preferences.
Pick your language preferences by clicking the gear icon that opens up Account Preferences.
The gear icon is waiting for you inside the Hub.
You’ll then have several languages to choose from. Select an option from the dropdown menu and The Hub will be instantly translated.
You can choose from English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
It’s as simple as that! Your language preference is one-click away.
P.S. Just around the corner, there will be options for timezones and more languages to choose from. All of this is coming VERY soon.
From Filters to Labels – We’ve Got You Covered!
You can now organize your websites in The Hub with filters and labels! That means you can filter them by category and color labels, which makes it visually more accessible for you to navigate and sort. Plus, name the labels however you’d like.
After all…
“Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.” – Patrick Ness
When it comes to filtering, let’s take a look at adding a specific color to a site first.
To color-code a site, you just click on the bar to the right of it.
Uh-oh. This site is gray and dull. Clicking this bar will change that.
Once you do that, you have the options of:
None
Purple
Blue
Green
Yellow
Orange
Red
Which color is your favorite?
Simply pick out a color, and your website will be represented by it in The Hub.
But wait! There’s more…
You can pick a different color from a color palette, delete colors, edit colors, and filter them. The Filters & Labels dropdown menu is where these options are.
Want more customization and sorting options? Here’s where it’s at.
When you click on the dropdown, you have the option to Edit.
Not fond of the way purple looks or its name? Change its tone and label it differently.
Here, you can edit any color by clicking on it. Change the name or the color itself.
Want a new color that’s not featured? That’s simple to do. Just hit Add Label.
A variety of colors await.
Bright, dull, neutral — the choice is yours!
Pick from the color palette any color you’d like.
Don’t want to label it a name of a color? No problem. You can label it whatever you would like (e.g. eCommerce).
Name a label anything you want.
When it comes to arranging the labels, drag & drop the colors in any order that suits you.
Drag & drop makes it easy.
For organizing your content, you can sort by Category and Labels.
From the categories, you can filter by:
Updates
Security
Speed
SEO
Backlogs
Uptime
This saves you gobs of time and helps avoid searching burnout.
You’ll see that ‘Updates’ appears on the screen’s lefthand side when selected in the Filter by area.
Notice how ‘Updates’ is on the left when selected on the right?
Filtering functions the same with Labels. Pick between any labels/colors that you want to sort through. Or, mix it up with both labels and a category.
Remove the category or labels at any time by clicking on them. Or you can hit Clear All.
You can take any of these out with one-click or do it all in one swoop with ‘Clear All.’
It’s an awesome way to quickly pull-up what you need and control what content is displayed.
Ready for More? Just You Wait.
In case you haven’t noticed, The Hub is continually growing with newer and better advancements. The labels and languages feature are just a small snippet of what’s to come.
If you’re not a member of WPMU DEV, consider becoming one. You’ll get immediate access to The Hub, award-winning premium plugins, and 24/7 support. Try us free for seven days.
Until our next colorful update, we’ll say goodbye, au revoir, tchau, & adiós!
Forminator is WPMU DEV’s 5-star form-builder plugin. It lets you easily create forms, quizzes, polls, collect payments from Stripe & PayPal, and much more — for free!
“Amazing plugin, it really seems that only your imagination can limit its uses.”
1. Get Quick and Easy Access to Forms, Stats, and More in the Forminator Dashboard
Forminator’s dashboard gives you quick, convenient, and easy access to form, quiz, and poll creation. It also gives you a quick overview and snapshot of all their stats and statuses, and lets you perform essential functions such as edit, preview, duplicate, copy shortcode, view submissions, export, and delete — all in one place.
A 360-degree view of Forminator’s dashboard with Forminator proudly looking over it. Everything is quickly accessible from here.
The top part of the dashboard gives you information about how many active modules you have and a breakdown of the total form, poll, and quiz submissions. Forminator also lets you know when the last submission took place.
Instantly in Forminator’s dashboard, you see quick stats on your forms, polls, and quizzes.
Below this, Forms, Quizzes, and Polls are accessible.
For this example, we’ll look at the Forms container. You can create a new form, see the forms you already have created, and check each one’s status.
When viewing, the blue circles indicate the form is published.
Do you want to create a new form? Click the + Create, and you’re all set!
If you’d like to see stats, you can click the Stats icon. It will then give you detailed information about the last submission, views, number of submissions, and conversion rate.
You can also edit and more from the stats area.
On each form, you can quickly manage it by clicking on the gear icon. From this spot, you can:
Edit
Preview
Copy Shortcode
View Submissions
Duplicate
Export
Delete
A dropdown appears with all of the options.
All of the options appear in a dropdown when you click the gear icon.
For Polls and Quizzes, the layout is the same. They are all quickly and easily accessible directly in Forminator’s dashboard.
2. Easily Create Basic Forms
Forminator lets you create and customize a form in just a few clicks. Templates are already set up for you to use as-is or you can easily add additional fields.
As soon as you hit Create, you’ll get immediate access to all templates.
The templates include:
Blank – Design your own form from scratch.
Contact Form – Includes essential information for users to contact you.
Quote Request – Lets users choose your services, add notes, and reach out to you.
Newsletter – Perfect for collecting email addresses and getting users to subscribe to your newsletter.
Registration – Requires users to set up a username, their email, and a password to register.
Login – Customize this form to allow your registered users to log in.
Create Post – Perfect for multiauthor sites, this allows users to create a post, upload featured images, add a category, and create a post.
Simply start off by picking the template that best suits your needs.
You can choose from blank, quote request, registration, contact form, newsletter, or login forms.
Each category has fields already set up. For example, a registration form has all of these fields prepopulated for you; including Username, Email, and Password.
Insert more fields to your liking or remove any unnecessary fields.
It’s up to you if you want to jumpstart a form with a template or start from scratch.
For a basic form, you can choose only the bare minimum of the required information—which includes Name, Email, and Phone Number. Clicking on the fields and highlighting them blue will add them to the form once you hit Insert Fields.
Add as many, or few, fields that you’d like.
Then, check out what your form looks like with the Preview button.
Want to add more fields? You can at any time.
If your form looks good, click Publish. Forminator gives you a shortcode that you can use in any WordPress post, page, or widget that allows code.
And this shortcode makes your form good to go.
Your form is all ready to use!
Need to make changes? No problem. You can edit the form any time if you need to add more fields, remove fields, tweak modifications, adjust colors — anything. Just access it on the dashboard.
3. Use Stripe and PayPal to Take Payments with No Setup Charges
Unlike other plugins on WordPress.org, Forminator lets you set up and use Stripe or PayPal payment methods on any form…completely free of setup charges!
It’s the ideal way to collect payment for eCommerce items, services, memberships, and more.
You can set up payments with Forminator in just a few quick and easy steps.
When creating a new form, you’ll see Stripe and PayPal in the Fields area.
Choose either Stripe or PayPal as payment methods.
Keep in mind that you can only pick one method per form. However, you can set up both accounts to decide between the two at any time.
To get the account to sync with Forminator, click on the specific field. You’ll get this message if you’re not connected:
When you click ‘here,’ you’ll get detailed information about connecting up to your account.
Both Stripe and PayPal will walk you through how to get set up. It’s quick and easy to do. If you need any help with this, we have documentation on how to do it.
Once you have them connected, you can take payments on any form and adjust numerous settings.
In the Labels area, customize the labels, description, and language. Also, there’s an option to show the card icon and enable the postal code.
Want to change the label? It’s easy to do.
In Settings, flip from Test to Live mode when you’re done testing your payments and ready to go live. Here is where you can also change the currency and payment amount. You can add a fixed amount or a variable amount based on a formula.
Change the currency, amount, and more in Settings.
You can customize the Payment Receipt, Payment Details, Card Validation, Billing Details, and Meta Data in the Advanced area.
Decide whether you want to email a receipt to your customers with a payment receipt.
Choose an email field for your payment receipt.
Easily set up Billing Details when enabled. With Stripe, they will appear on your Stripe dashboard for each payment.
Customize the fields for billing details.
In the Styling section, you can add additional CSS classes for complete customization.
Customize the CSS to your liking.
Add rules and conditions to any payment for under Visibility.
Create a new rule based on a specific field.
And now, you’re ready to cash-in with a functional payment form that incorporates Stripe or PayPal.
Add as much detailed information that is required for your payment form.
For more information on building an order form and collect payments, view this quick video:
Also, to see a payment form in action, check out this t-shirt shop we set up. It’s a great example of an order form with various options.
4. Set Up a Poll for Your Audience
Getting a poll set up is a snap with Forminator. Polls are great for gathering information, creating tests, adding a fun element, and much more.
From the dashboard, hit Create and give it a name. In the Question areas—type in any question that you’d like.
What type of question do you have? Ask!
In the Question area, you can add an image and a description of the question.
Once you have your question, the next part is adding the Answers.
You can add as many answers that you’d like and enable custom input so users can add their responses.
Clicking this gear will enable you to add custom input.
Along with this, customize the button for when a user submits the poll.
Add ‘vote,’ ‘submit,’ or anything else. You decide!
When it comes to the poll’s appearance, Forminator gives you a lot of options. You can change the Design Style, Colors, Padding, Border, and add custom CSS.
Make this poll’s appearance become whatever you want.
In the Behavior section, adjust the way results are displayed. You can choose between Link on Poll, Show After Voted, or Do Not Show. Also, you have a choice between a Pie Chart or Bar Graph for results.
Along with displaying results, Forminator lets you show or hide the vote count.
Choosing between a Pie Chart and Bar Graph is a tough decision. They both look good!
There is also an option for Reloading the page after submissions or Ajax.
Plus, you can pick your Voting Limit. Allow multiple voting or just once. Choose the method of doing this by using either the User IP or Browser Cookie.
With Rendering, load polls using Ajax or prevent the page caching on poll pages.
Limit voters from voting more than once.
When you have the behavior of the form adjusted, you can go to Notifications and receive email notifications whenever a user’s poll results are submitted.
You can customize the email to go to other email addresses, edit the message, and add CC, BCC options.
As far as Integrations goes, there are many choices when it comes to syncing with a 3rd party app. Use an option like Zapier to gain access to thousands of apps that work with Forminator’s polls.
All connected apps will appear in the Integrations area. If you don’t have what you need, you can add additional apps at any time. Then, click on the Plus sign to integrate with a specific poll.
We have Zapier connected with this poll.
The Settings area is where you can control your Data Storage and adjust Privacy settings.
There are options to disable storing submissions in your database. You can also change how long you want to retain a poll’s submission for and adjust how long you want to keep IP addresses before a submission is anonymized.
Disable store submissions in your database with one-click.
With Forminator, you can preview anything before publishing.
I think we all know the answer to this one.
When it looks good, hit Publish, and your poll is ready to go.
Use the shortcode provided on any WordPress page, post, or acceptable widget.
5. Crunch Numbers by Creating Calculations
If you need to create sophisticated calculations or add just a simple tax to an eCommerce order, the Calculations field can be a great additional benefit. You may need one if your WordPress site features mortgages, financial loans, statistics, a BMI calculator — there are thousands of combinations.
The Calculations field is where you’ll input the formula you want to use. It works with other fields using the merge tags that you enable for calculations. The fields that function with calculations are Number,Radio, Checkbox, Selection, and Currency.
The calculations field works with other fields to create customized formulas.
To start things off, under Labels, you can enter a label, placeholder, and description.
Name the label anything that you’d like.
Decide between the Field Type and choose the number of decimal places that you want to round off the results in the Settings.
Hide the field so that the calculated result doesn’t show up on the form if you want or keep it on read-only.
To create actual calculations, go to the Calculations tab.
For example, this calculation is the Radio field is multiplied by two.
This area gives you a preview of the calculation as well.
This formula means that whatever calculation is in the Radio will be multiplied by two in the form.
To add some style, additional CSS classes in the Styling section.
Add any additional CSS classes that you’d like here.
Include rules and conditions in the Visibility area. Here, you can decide what is included and more with the various Fields.
You decide the rules with Forminator.
Whether calculations are mandatory (e.g. adding tax to a product) or a useful feature that adds value (e.g. a loan calculator for potential customers), Forminator’s calculations can be beneficial for your WordPress site.
Quizzes are great for entertainment, educational purposes, and engagement. One can quickly and easily get a quiz set up in Forminator’s dashboard.
When you create a new one, right away, Forminator will ask you what type of quiz you’d like to create. You have the option of Knowledge Quiz or Personality Quiz.
You decide what type of quiz you want to have right away.
In this example, let’s look at a Knowledge Quiz. When you start, you choose a Title, Feature Image, and a Description.
How well would you perform on a quiz about forms?
You’re able to add as many questions as you want in the Questions section by clicking Add Question. Then, you add the question, answers, and any images and select what answer is the right one in the checkbox.
I’ve heard bad things about Lumpy Forms.
Add as many answers as you’d like at any time.
And to nail the look of the form, you can adjust numerous options in the Appearance section.
The Design Style allows you to choose from the Default, Flat, Bold, Material, or None.
A preview is displayed when you select the various options.
In Colors, there are practically no limitations to colors for answer containers, submit button, social sharing, and more. In each category, the dropdown will open up color palettes that you can pick colors by their number (e.g. #8C8C8C for a gray) or visually.
Choose the right colors for your quiz.
With Google Fonts, you can pick the perfect font for your quiz.
Click Custom to pick from numerous font options.
Picking a layout for your quiz is available in the Layout area. Here, you can also choose the quiz alignment.
Choose the layout that works best for you.
To wrap-up the appearance, you can customize the appearance with custom CSS as well.
Control how this quiz acts when users click through it. The Behavior section is where you can customize behavior features.
It starts with the Results area. Determine if the correct answer will be displayed in real-time or upon submission. You can also show a loader that indicates it’s evaluating the selected response.
Show the correct answer in real-time in the Results section.
Edit the copy in the Messages section. This is to display what comes up with an answer is correct, incorrect, and how to display the final count.
Customize the messages users will see when taking the quiz.
And what good is a quiz without social sharing? Forminator gives you the option to choose sharing options for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can also customize your social share message.
The Social Sharing area lets you customize your sharing options.
If you want to get notified every time there is a quiz submitted, enable it in the Email Notifications area.
Also, you can add any Integrations to your quiz. For more on this, see the section of this article about setting up a poll. Integration with quizzes functions the same way.
Lastly, you can set up your data settings in the Settings tab.
Once you have your quiz set up and ready to go, hit Preview and take a look…
Looks like the right answer.
Are you happy with it? Then hit Publish, copy & paste Forminator’s shortcode to your WordPress site, and start quizzing your visitors.
If you choose to create a Personality quiz, it’s similar to set up just like a Knowledge Quiz.
A significant difference is the Personalities section. Here, you can add as many personalities as you’d like.
You can see we have Dev Man, Hummingbird, and Defender personalities here.
Once you have the personalities set up, the next step is adding the questions in the Question area.
Ask anything you’d like and then match it up to the personality. Likewise, you pick who this wouldn’t be like. You can make it a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ caption or whatever you choose.
Dev Man is pretty fond of this color.
Create as many personalities and questions as you’d like. When you’re finished, like our other quiz, hit Preview and — if good — Publish.
What superhero are you like?
Forminator’s personality quiz is incredibly fun, engaging, and share-worthy for your WordPress site.
7. Add Time-Saving Convenience with eSignatures
Add eSignatures for simple, convenient, and effective form processing options. It’s a way for users to sign a form with a mouse, trackpad, digital pencil, or even upload one.
eSignatures are secure, convenient, and have a faster turnaround than traditional documents that require a signature.
To set one up, simply go to the eSignature field…
Add additional fields that you’d like to include with your eSignature.
…and adjust the label and placeholder in the Labels area. You can also add a description.
Choose your own label for the eSignature.
There’s a lot of options when creating the eSignature field in Settings. You can select what type of file you want the signature to be (e.g. PNG), the height of the signature field, stroke thickness, and whether a signature is required or not.
Require an eSignature? Just hit ‘Required’ and you’re all set.
You can add additional CSS classes to the form in Styling. Also, include any rules and conditions in the Visibility area.
Once you have a form set up, you’re ready for signatures!
Forminator has officially signed-off on this.
Keep in mind that eSignatures are a Forminator Pro feature only. Watch this video below to see for yourself the advantages of Forminator Pro.
For more detailed information about Forminator’s eSignatures and how to include an upload option for your users, read this article.
8. Organize Contacts Using the Submissions Area
You can go to individual forms, quizzes, and polls to view submissions in the Submissions area. Then, you can export the data, get more detailed information, delete submissions, and use that data with a CRM like HubSpot for continued marketing.
You choose between Forms, Polls, or Quizzes. Then, there’s a dropdown with the names of individual forms from the categories. Clicking on Show Submissions will display all the data.
Where you choose between forms, polls, or quizzes. Then, you can see the submissions.
Once you have an individual form ready to view, it will show you all the submissions.
This particular form has one entry.
When you click on the dropdown you can get detailed information.
Details such as the name, email address, phone number, and signature are in this example.
Filter your data search by clicking on the icon in the upper right corner. You can search by date range, form ID, keyword, and pick how the search results are displayed.
Clicking this will narrow the search.
Also, export the search results in one-click.
Clicking Export will give you options to download data as a CSV file.
Even schedule exports to happen automatically.
Indicate to send data automatically only if new submissions are entered.
The Submissions area will help you organize your data and…
9. Use Forminator with 3rd Party App Integrations
Add 3rd party applications to sync with Forminator by adding Integrations. There are over +1000 of your favorite apps that you can use. Everything from CRM, email services, cloud storage, and project management.
In the Integrations area, it will show you what apps you have connected and also available apps that can be used.
In this example, Zapier, FortressDB, and MailChimp are all connected.
Each app has its own instructions for enabling it. When you click on one, it will walk you through the process.
If you want, for example, Slack to be installed, it will walk you through on what you need to do.
Integrations are great for combining forces to get the most out of your forms. Plus, with Forminator Pro, you can also build your own integration and custom Forminator apps.
10. Add More Form Adjustments in Settings
Your perfect form takes only a few steps. You decide what it includes, how it functions, and what it looks like. Along with all of the tweaks you can make on individual forms, several more can be added in Settings.
In the Dashboard settings, you can adjust the Module Listings for forms, polls, and quizzes. This shows the number of forms published on the dashboard. Here you can also adjust the Status to include published and drafts.
Want to see the published and draft forms? Click both boxes.
With Form Headers, the capability of changing the sender’s name and email address.
What we’ve set up in this example as an email and name.
The Pagination area lets you determine the number of modules and submissions to show per page.
Pick how many modules to display on the page.
Opt for a high contrast mode to increase the visibility and accessibility of elements and components to meet WCAG AAA requirements in the Accessibility area.
Enable the high contrast mode in one-click.
Data settings let you choose what happens to the plugin and data when reset. Also, you can reset the plugin to its default state from here.
Start fresh with a reset.
Enable Google reCaptcha, import existing forms from Contact Form 7, handle the forms, quizzes, and polls submission data by the length of time, and also set up payments for PayPal and Stripe.
The Settings area is another section to get the forms adjusted perfectly to your specifications.
11. Use Forms on Multiple Sites Using Import/Export Options
Have a lot of WordPress sites that you want to include your form, poll, or quiz on? No problem. You can easily export any form just by clicking on Export from the dropdown.
Clicking the gear icon will bring up the Export option.
Once you click Export, it will give you the option to Download the text from the form. You can also copy it directly.
Copy & paste the text or download it.
When it comes to importing a form, you can do this very simply by clicking Import on the top of Forminator’s dashboard.
Click and import. It’s as simple as that.
When you click Import, here you can paste the text from Forminator or from your download. Once the text is pasted, clicking Import will complete the process.
Add text in the empty box and click Import.
Your form is now connected to any WordPress site that has Forminator!
Forms, Polls, and Quizzes At Your Fingertips
As you can see, there is a ton you can do to get the most out of Forminator, our contact form, payment form and custom form building plugin.
Forminator takes you beyond creating forms, polls, and quizzes in just a few easy steps.
With the integrations, you can set up eCommerce stores, store data on the cloud, email market out to existing customers, and much more.
Plus, it doesn’t stop there! Forminator is always coming out with new enhancements (e.g. subscriptions are coming soon!) and updates thanks to our superhero developers. You can keep tabs on what’s happening next in our Roadmap.
Contact forms not only let visitors get in touch with you, they are also essential for lead generation. With our free 5-star Forminator plugin, adding a contact form to your WordPress site is easy, as this guide will show you!
This tutorial will demonstrate how to set up the perfect contact form and create the ability for visitors to reach you (and reach back out to them) in just a few clicks.
A new form is a cinch with Forminator. Let’s get started!
1. Create Contact Forms Faster Using Time-Saving Templates
With Forminator’s premade templates, just click Contact Form, name it, hit Create, and it will be set up for you immediately.
Click this button, and let’s create a contact form for your site.
This form comes with all the essentials a simple contact form needs: First Name, Email Address, Phone Number, Message, and Send Message.
Use the default fields to instantly create a basic contact form.
You can add more fields and edit accordingly. However, if this serves its purpose, just click Publish, and Forminator delivers a shortcode for use on any WordPress page, post, or acceptable widget.
Creating a contact form with Forminator is quick, simple, and easy!
Forminator automatically syncs with your admin email, so when users opt-in, you’ll get notified.
You now have a form that’s ready to collect information and be used on your website. It’s that simple.
2. Customize Forms to Suit Your Needs by Adjusting Their Appearance
Forminator gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to adjusting the appearance of your contact form with colors, fonts, custom CSS, and more.
The Design Style area comes with a pre-made style.
Pick Forminator’s premade designs or jazz it up with some CSS.
You can adjust the Design Style with options like Default, Flat, Bold, Material, or you can opt for None.
Pick the style that works best for your contact form.
From here, you can change the colors in the Colors section. This is where you can customize it perfectly to fit your color palette on your website.
Adjust the colors on many elements of the form, such as the form container, submission indicator, field basics, and more. Or use the default colors.
Color options are endless when it comes to customizing your form.
Click on an individual element to change its colors.
Add custom colors to any form element.
Similar to the colors, you can change many font levels in Fonts. Forminator’s font options include inheriting the theme’s fonts, or you can customize these.
Match your brand’s fonts throughout the entire form.
Any of these fonts can be overwritten with custom ones by Google Fonts. You can also change the font size and weight.
Choose from hundreds of fonts.
You can also customize your form container’s border and padding in the Form Container area.
Beyond that, you can adjust the radius, thickness, and style. Also, in the Spacing area, you can adjust the spacing with options of Comfortable, Compact, or Custom — where you’ll enter your spacing in pixels.
Need more space? The border and spacing can be customized however you’d like.
You can also add custom CSS for more advanced modifications.
3. Control the Behavior of Your Form for Maximum Performance
Your contact form’s behavior is how your form functions while a user is filling it out and when the user hits submit.
Being able to edit and modify key points any way you’d like puts you in control of your contact form’s behavior.
To start with, you can adjust the Submission Behavior. Modify submission behavior with an Inline Message, Redirect to a specific URL, or Hide Form upon submission.
You can also customize the message and set the time (in seconds) to auto-close the success message (which indicates the form was submitted okay).
Add a personalized message to your users.
Forminator allows you to choose your Method of reloading the page. You can use AJAX to send the form without reloading the page or reload the page.
The Validation method is for fields that you’ve chosen to validate. This feature shows how these will behave when a user submits, whether to run validation checks when the user submits the form using Ajax or on the server-side using PHP, and returning any error messages after a page reload.
Also, there is a Submission Indicator feature that shows the loader if activated.
Keep users in the loop by letting them know that the form will be submitted.
There are also options for enabling Autofill, Security (Honeypot protection and logged in submissions only), and the Lifespan of a form.
Lifespan allows your form to expire on a specific date or after a certain number of submissions.
Make it easy to submit a form with Autofill.
4. Set Up Email Notifications for Instant Alerts
Customize email notifications for your admin and site visitors in just a few clicks with Email Notifications.
You can create emails that get delivered to your admin team or any specified email addresses when a form is submitted.
There are also advanced options for CC Emails, BBC Emails, Reply-to Emails. Plus, you can add conditions based on user input and rules for additional customization.
Get a notification the way that you want it when a new form is submitted.
5. Advance Forms Further by Integrating with Popular 3rd Party Apps
You can send a specific form’s data to a connected 3rd party app, such as MailChimp, FortressDB, Slack, and more. It’s all done right in Forminator’s dashboard.
Forminator will show you a list of connected apps that you have available; from there, you can activate it to connect with the form by hitting the plus sign and Activate App.
All contacts from a form can go directly into MailChimp.
Every app will have different prompts to get it to synchronize and will walk you through exactly how to do it. Once finished, your form will sync with the app, and it will work accordingly.
You can connect and disconnect from any 3rd party app at any time.
3rd party apps are perfect for continuing marketing through email providers, storing information on the cloud, and much more.
6. Control Your Data Storage to Your Standards in Settings
With Settings, you can control the Data Storage by disabling any submissions in your database. All submissions are stored by default if not enabled.
You can also customize how long you’d like to retain the form’s submission for a specific amount of time in the Privacy settings.
Finally, there are options for handling account erasure requests and keeping files that are submitted if the form gets deleted.
Data storage controls have never been more straightforward.
Edit data storage in Forminator’s global privacy settings at any time.
7. Separate a Form Perfectly with Pagination
Add pagination to your form to break it up into individual sections. Pagination leaves the style not as cluttered looking, which is beneficial if you have a lot of fields that are required.
Simply add the Page Break field, and Pagination will appear on top. You can then insert page breaks in between various fields and separate the form however you’d like.
You can adjust the Progress Indicator, Buttons Text, and the Labels.
Once completed, your users will go step-by-step through the form.
Use pagination to break up complex forms.
8. Preview and Easily Implement Your Form Using Shortcodes
Does your form look good? Hit Preview any time to get a glimpse of it and try it out…
Preview and test your new contact form.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, when you’re ready, once you hit Publish on your new contact form, Forminator provides you with a shortcode that you can paste into WordPress pages, posts, or acceptable widgets to display your form.
Forminator’s shortcode gets the “thumbs-up”.
You can always access the shortcode in Forminator’s admin. Along with that, you can change, edit, and adjust your form at any time and the changes will automatically propagate throughout your site wherever you have added the form via the shortcode.
And Like That, It Forms
With all the elements in place, you can have your contact form up and running in no time.
The perfect contact form will contain information that is required to serve your purpose. With Forminator, you can adjust a form exactly how you want to ensure it functions perfectly for your WordPress site.
Speaking of contact forms, be sure to use ours to reach out to our 24/7 support team superheroes if you ever have any questions and need to contact us.
And to keep tabs on what’s coming up with Forminator, check out our Roadmap any time.
Selling items on WordPress has never been as streamlined, thanks to Forminator, our 5-star forms plugin. You can set up your shop quickly and efficiently with free payment options like Stripe and Paypal integration, customizable product features, discount codes, and more — all for free!
If you’re trying to figure out an easier way to accepts payments online securely or put together a functional eStore without overcomplicating things, this tutorial will show you how you can sell stuff super easily without having to worry about an elaborate WooCommerce setup.
We’ll take you step-by-step through some of Forminator’s more advanced features that will benefit you and your shoppers.
You’ll also see how Forminator, combined with our free email capture plugin, Hustle, can make your online shop “pop” (literally, as you’ll see). Hustle can offer special discounts to your visitors before leaving your site and collect their email at the same time so you can continue marketing to them.
With Forminator, your visitors can be shopping in no time on a storefront like this…
Sell stuff super easily…no WooCommerce required!
We’ll start by setting up an order form and then look at enhancing it further with Hustle.
Throughout this tutorial, we’ll be working with an ordering form for a Dev Man t-shirt as an example:
The sales page we’re using has a ton of customized options.
Sure, you can create a simple order form with Forminator in just a few clicks, but we’re taking things up a notch.
Forminator can build pretty impressive sales pages with advanced options, such as the number of items, sales tax, discount codes, and more.
As you’ll see, you can create professional payment and order forms that will give your shoppers more choices and be visually appealing. Plus, depending on your offering, many of these features may need to be included.
Though it’s advanced, it’s still simple to set up.
By the time we’re done, you will know how to put together a sophisticated eCommerce payment form with advanced functionality, calculations, and more…all built with free components!
2. Structure Your Order Form with Pagination
Pagination is the field for page breaks. This is perfect for breaking down your ordering form into sections and making it less cluttered.
When you add your first Page Break field to your form, you’ll see a Pagination at the top of the other areas.
This order form has three sections. Here’s a quick look at them…
Click the Pagination section to open it up and edit the page breaks in the form. In this example, under Labels, it’s broken up as:
Page 1: Choose Product
Page 2: Shipping Address
Finish: Checkout
Where you add the page break labels for the form.
In the Settings section, you have the option for a progress indicator to show users how far they are through your form. Also, you can customize the text for the Next and Previous buttons.
Pagination settings area.
Breaking up an order form is a great way to walk your users through the checkout process.
3. Create Product Labels with Select Field Options
It’s time to determine the options for t-shirts and incorporate this into the form. For this, we are using the Select fields for the choices of Style, Color, and Size.
They are labeled accordingly and placed at the top of the form in the upper section.
The Select fields labeled according to what they are.
Each one can then be edited by what to include in the Labels section. For example, with the colors, the form has the options of green and yellow.
The labels section where you can add various options.
The process is the same for the Style field.
With Size, this has some calculation variables that we need to include since this is also where it displays the price. The prices are all different, depending on the size.
You can see the various prices that vary by size.
The Calculations tab is where you’ll make calculations (I’ll show you how this all adds-up soon).
You can Enable this and indicate the price by a numerical value for each size. As you can see, they all vary.
Individual prices are calculated here.
The next option to indicate is the amount. For this, we’re using a Number field. How many do you want? is the way it’s labeled.
The Number field option to indicate the number of items a user wants to purchase.
You can adjust the settings in the field and indicate a minimum and maximum amount available for purchase.
4. Set Up Discounts and a Base Price
When a user decides what they want to purchase, it all needs to be added up. This section is where you add calculations and discounts.
With a Text field, you can mention an option for a discount. Here we have it worded Have a discount coupon?
The Text field with the discount feature.
We’ll now include two Calculations fields to get the discount feature to function. Calculations are to the right of the Text field.
The first Discount field is for when someone enters the correct discount code. The Calculation field then calculates a 20% discount and becomes visible.
The calculation field is still required when the coupon code isn’t entered, so that, in these cases, this Discount field will become visible (you’ll see in the Visibility screenshot coming up) and show the discounted amount as 0.
The two Calculations fields.
To get this to function, go to the Settings area of the first field (calculator-4). The Field Type needs to be set at Read-Only, and the Decimal Places placed at 2.
Calculation settings.
In the Calculations area, we’ve added the formula ({select-3)*{number-1})*0.2. This indicates that Select-3 (Size) multiplies the Number-1 (How many do you want?) and the percentage discount we want to offer (in this case, 20%).
Where you’ll enter the calculations formula for size and the number of items.
This calculation works by multiplying the “size*quantity” by 0.2 to find out the discounted amount.
The rule for the discount coupon is in the Visibility tab. We’ll be using the coupon code DEVMAN20. We used the Field as Text-1 (Have a discount coupon?), have the Condition as Is, and the Value is DEVMAN20.
When all the conditions are in place, hit Done and Apply to save.
The next Calculations field (calculation-5) will be set similar to the other one; however, there are a couple of changes.
We’ll be using the calculation ({select-3}*{number-1})*0.
The calculation formula for the size and number of items a customer wants.
Also, in the Visibility tab, we’re changing the Condition to Is not. Every other setting is the same as the previous Calculations tab.
The other rule in the Calculations tab.
Now that we have these conditions set, we add the base price. The Base Price is another Calculation field (calculation-1).
Where to put the Base Price field.
Under Settings, it’s set as Read-Only and has two as the number of decimals.
For the Calculations field, it includes the calculation set at ({select-3}*{number-1})-({calculation-4}).
The calculation formula for the base price.
This calculation works by finding the original price and multiplying the size with the quantity field (e.g., {select-3)*{number-1}) and then subtracting the discount.
Beyond that, there are no rules or anything else to add to this field.
5. Calculate the Tax and Total Price
The last piece of the numbers puzzle is adding in the Tax and Total Price. These are both Calculation fields (calculation-1 and calculation-2) added below Base Price in our form.
The Tax and Total Price fields.
For the tax field, add a description of the tax amount under Labels, so users will know that it’s 18% (you can set any rate that you require).
Where you describe the amount of tax a customer will be charged.
In Settings, the Field Type is Read-Only, and the Decimal Places is 2.
As for the Calculations, the one that included for tax is the formula {calculation-1}*0.18. This means that 18% of Base Price is the price that we calculated in the previous step.
The tax formula.
Nothing else is necessary for this field.
Finally, the field for the total price (calculation-3) includes the formula {calculation-1}+{calculation-2}. This formula will add up the total amount by combining the base price with tax.
Total amount calculation.
That will do it for all of the calculations and the first section of the form. Forminator will calculate the numbers for the customer and add everything up to determine the price.
From here, customers will go onto the next section, where they’ll enter their address.
You can see a page break indicates that the next section will be just for the Address, created with the Address field. Another page break follows it.
The address field between page breaks.
For the address field, it includes the vital information needed and nothing else. You can edit specific information (e.g., ‘country’) anyway that you’d like.
Customers can now click ‘Next’ to check out. Cha-ching!
6. Create the Checkout Section
Getting this part set up is extremely simple. Just be sure you have a Stripe or PayPal account connected with Forminator. If you need help with this, please refer to our documentation.
All we’ve included are fields for Name, Email, and Stripe.
The fields created for the checkout area.
From this point, the only thing that was changed is the Submit button at the bottom of the fields. Place Order is the text.
The Submit button field.
We also edited the Error Message in the Labels area to Error: Your form is not valid, please fix the errors!
The Button Text and Error Message.
With all of this information in place, it’s now time to cash out and complete the purchase!
But uh-oh…
It looks like a customer is about to leave the page without buying our fantastic t-shirt. The pop-up is where you hook them with an offer they can’t refuse before they take-off.
7. Set Up a Special Discount Exit-Intent Pop-Up — (with Hustle)
Hustle is our free marketing plugin that pops-in and saves the sale just when you need it. You’ll see how beneficial it is to include him with Forminator when a customer is ready to bail.
Hustle and Forminator: Together they form the perfect duo.
You can set up a promotion that pops up and offers a special discount code that corresponds with the order form.
If they opt for the discount, you’ll also capture their email address to continue marketing.
So, let’s set this form up and keep this shopper from going anywhere…
When Hustle is downloaded and activated, you can create a new pop-up in the WordPress admin.
In the Content area of Hustle, we’ve added the title Don’t miss this! and a subtitle of We are giving away a 20% discount. We also added images.
The Content area of Hustle.
In the Main Content area, we’ve included a message urging users to sign up.
Hustle’s Main Content area.
To offer the code, the user needs to enter their email address. Inserting email is done in the Email section of Hustle. You’ll simply place the Email field. Also, the button text was changed to Get my discount coupon.
The Email area of Hustle.
Once they opt-in, the discount code is provided to them by adding it in Submission Behavior.
Where you’ll enter any message and also the promo code.
Their email address can also be added to a 3rd party application (e.g. MailChimp) in the Integrations area.
With this promo now launched, Hustle knows when to grab their attention before they leave. In the Behavior section, under Pop-up Trigger, you can pick Exit Intent on when this is displayed.
Where to set the pop-up for the ad.
And users will then be greeted with a special discount:
The promotion pop-up.
Once they opt-in, they get the promo code. Who could pass on 20% off?
DEVMAN20 is what they can use for the discount.
And with this, there’s a good chance they’ll hit PLACE ORDER…
As you can see, thanks to Forminator, you can launch and fund off an online store on WordPress for free by creating an above normal checkout process.
There’s also much more you can do with Forminator. He has options for eSignatures, integration with FortressDB, calculators, and much more! With all of the customization options, you can set up your online store exactly how you want.
And if you ever need additional help setting up shop, contact our WPMU DEV 24/7 support superheroes.
With Forminator and Hustle, your store should take form in no time.
Keeping your WordPress site safe often requires no more than the click of a button with Defender, our 5-star WordPress security plugin.
Defender protects your site 24/7 against hackers, malicious code, SQL injections, and much more. This guide shows you how to get the most out of using the plugin.
With Defender installed, your site’s security needs are automatically handled.
One of the great things about Defender is that he’ll automatically start suggesting ways to boost your site’s security as soon as he’s installed. He’ll then continue making regular suggestions while keeping your site safe, secure, and protected.
Despite all the built-in automation, when it comes to getting the most out of the plugin, Defender gives you plenty of room to tweak, finetune, and harden your site’s security settings.
This guide covers seven areas of WordPress security that you can count on Defender to monitor and address:
You will also find links to other great articles about Defender for more information on specific topics.
Let’s begin by showing you how to…
1. Set Up Security Tweaks
Once Defender is installed and activated, security issues are immediately brought to your attention.
This is where Security Tweaks can take care of most of them with one-click. Defender will show you how many issues you have, what they are, and how to fix them almost instantly.
Everything is displayed in an actionable list under Issues.
What greets you in Defender’s dashboard under Security Tweaks.
When you click on the dropdown for a specific issue, it gives you two options: Ignore or click the blue button to take care of the suggested security tweak with one-click.
In this example, the suggestion is to disable the file editor.
If you choose to resolve the issue, it will then be in the Resolved area. If you ignore it, it will go in the Ignored section. If no action is taken, it will stay as an Issue.
If you resolve the issue and decide that you want to keep it the way it was, you can revert it at any time by clicking the Revert button.
The issue got resolved and it’s easy to revert with one click.
As you can see, any issues that come along will be brought to your attention and can be taken care of quickly and effortlessly.
The Malware Scanning section lets you scan for malware in one-click and set up Defender to scan all your files on a regular basis, check if there are any problems, and report back to you (and anyone else you specify).
Where you’ll click for a new scan.
Once activated, Defender scans your WordPress core files and alerts you if it finds anything suspicious.
Defender scanning your files.
Once the scan is complete, Defender then lists all the files it thinks could be suspicious under Issues.
Issues from the scan.
If you click the dropdown of the suspicious file, it will give you precise information about the issue, including the issue details, error code, location, size, and date it was added.
From this point, you can ignore the issue or delete it with one-click.
The issue and the options to ignore or delete.
If you have multiple issues, you can also take care of all issues in bulk by selecting Bulk Update or Ignore in the dropdown.
All issues can be taken care of at once in the bulk action dropdown.
Note of caution:It’s recommended that you are 100% certain that something is harmless before deleting and/or ignoring it. We have our export available 24/7 for live support if you’re unsure or need advice.
For additional scanning, Defender Pro will tackle these areas:
Plugins and Themes: All plugins and themes will be scanned for publicly-reported, known vulnerabilities.
Suspicious Code: This cranks-up the scanning potential by scanning all site files for suspicious PHP functions and code.
The additional scanning is added in Pro.
Along with the scanning aspect, you can adjust the settings to determine what kind of scans you want to do and to turn off a scan with Scan Types. If you have Defender Pro, you’ll get to determine all three scan types.
You can also include the maximum size of files to include. Any files larger than the specified size (in Mb), Defender will exclude from the scans.
Scan types and also where you can adjust the maximum file size that you want Defender to skip during scans.
Plus, adjust the notifications so that you can get emails sent directly to you about issues when they’re detected.
The Enable Notifications settings area.
It’s just a one-switch option to turn on. Also, easily customize the emails for when an issue is found and also when no issues are found.
Where you can adjust email settings.
Additionally, you can enable reporting with Defender Pro.
It allows you to send reports about issues at a specific time of your choosing. You can choose from daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also specify the day of the week and time of day you would like to receive reports.
Once reporting is enabled, Defender will then let you know if it finds suspicious activity and send you a report as you have scheduled. Defender also gives you the option of receiving notifications even when no issues are detected.
With Defender Pro, you can track and log every event that happens on your website with Audit Logging. You’ll get detailed reports on what exactly is going on behind the scenes (e.g. hacking attempts) so you can keep track of any security threats.
The Audit Logging dashboard that contains all the recent events.
Defender can export all the events as a CSV and arrange the events by dates.
Each event summary has detailed information about it in its dropdown.
A detailed description of a logged report.
Adjust the settings to set up how long you’d like to keep the events stored in our API. You can also turn off this feature at any time.
Where to specify how long you’d like to keep events stored.
This also includes scheduled reporting, where an email of a summary of all events on your WordPress site gets automatically emailed to you. You can add recipients, schedule the frequency, day of the week, and time of day for when they’re sent.
Where you’ll schedule reports.
Audit logging is a great way to stay on top of all events happening on your site and keep it secure.
4. Ban Suspicious Behavior with Firewall
Defender’s powerful firewall can keep your WordPress safe with IP banning, location banning, automatically identifying bad acting IPs, and more. There’s a ton that it does (as you’ll see).
Defender automatically bans repeat offenders so it’s effortless on your part to keep them away. Beyond that, there are a lot of areas with Defender’s firewall you can activate for added security.
This is a brief overview of what’s included with Defender’s firewall so you can take advantage of using it:
Login Protection
Put a stop to hackers trying to randomly use your login credentials. It will lock out users with too many login attempts.
You can put a threshold on how many failed login attempts a person is allowed and the timeframe for lockout. Then, you can specify the duration of time for the lockout.
Where you’ll specify the threshold and duration of time for a lockout.
Also, create a customized message that will be sent to locked out users. In the same section, there’s an area to enter banned usernames.
An example of this is users shouldn’t be using admin, hostname, or administrator as their username. If someone tries to login with one of those names, it’s a clear indication that it’s a malicious attempt and is blocked by Defender when those usernames are listed in the Banned section.
Where you can create a customized message and also add banned usernames.
To deactivate, you can do so with a click of a button.
It’s a great deterrent for hackers that will simply get tired of getting locked out of your site because of failed login attempts.
404 Detection
Defender keeps an eye out and reports IP addresses that repeatedly request pages on your website that don’t exist. From there, he’ll temporarily block them from your WordPress site.
This occurs usually from bots that crawl every link in your site trying to locate a back-end admin area so they can wreak havoc or requests from the same IP addresses for pages on your WordPress site that are non-existent.
If this happens too regularly, Defender will block users from accessing your site.
In the 404 Detection area, you can see how many lockouts were logged, adjust how long they’re locked out if banned, create a custom message, and more.
When activated, the top of the screen tells you the current lockouts that are logged. Below that, you can adjust the amount of 404 errors before it triggers a lockout. Beyond that, you change the duration of how long you’d like to ban a locked-out user. You can also opt for a permanent ban.
Where it displays the current lockouts, threshold, and duration of lockout time for users is located.
Next is a spot to create a customized message for locked out users.
Where you’ll create your customized message.
Once created, offenders will be greeted by Defender with the message of your choice.
Defender’s message to mischiefs.
You can also choose specific files and folders you’d like to Allowlist or Blocklist.
Any files or folder URLs that you want to automatically ban, you can do so here. Likewise, you can include common files or folders that your website is missing, but you don’t want to Blocklist, by adding them to the Allowlist.
The Blocklist and Allowlist area for file and folder URLs.
You can also Allowlist and Blocklist file types and extensions in this area.
There is also a switch to turn off monitoring 404s from logged-in users if you decide to do so.
IP Banning
Here you can add any IPs you’d like to permanently ban and also allow.
The Blocklist is for blocking IPs and the Allowlist allows them access all the time.
The IP Blocklist and Allowlist.
Here, it also displays the active lockouts. Also in this area, Defender can ban locations by countries in this section with the help of Maxmind.
Finally, Import and Export any Allowlist and Blocklist so you can add or export to another website with just a few clicks.
Logs
Defender logs all IP lockouts and has them available for you to view so you can stay on top of your security.
You can sort by date, add them to allowlist, and bulk update in one area.
The logs area in Defender.
Under each detail, you can click the dropdown to get a detailed look at the description, type of issue, IP address, date & time, and ban status. Plus, you can Allowlist or ban the individual IP in this section, too.
The dropdown with details.
There’s an option to bulk update everything by clicking on individual issues or all of them at once. The updates include Ban, Allowlist, and Delete.
Where to bulk update IP lockout details.
All activity is monitored and controlled so you can stay on top of suspicious activity on your WordPress site with ease.
Notifications
You can choose several email notifications for specific issues, who the email recipients are, and also choose when to stop receiving notifications after a certain number of lockouts.
Where to adjust your notifications.
The notifications you can enable are Login Protection Lockout and 404 Detection Lockout.
With Login Protection, you’ll get emails when an IP address is locked out for trying to access your login area. And with 404 Detection Lockout, you’ll get notified when an IP has repeated hits on non-existent files.
This gives you notifications so you can be aware of any issues happening immediately.
Settings
The Firewall has a settings area to adjust how long to store logs and also where to delete logs in one-click.
The Settings area.
The capability to choose how many days of event logs to be stored can be changed at any time by specifying the days.
Reporting
Reporting is a feature available in Defender Pro. With this, you can get regular updates that you schedule however you’d like. You can also add any recipients you want to receive the reports and the frequency of reports.
The Reporting area.
This is a great way to get lockout reports for your WordPress site regularly.
Another feature is WAF (Web Application Firewall). This comes included with our hosting. When combined with Defender Pro, it’s the first layer of defense to block troublemakers and bot attacks way before they even reach your site.
It filters requests against our optimized managed ruleset covering frequent attacks (OWASP Top Ten) and performs virtual patching of WordPress plugin, core, and theme vulnerabilities.
This can be enabled directly from WPMU DEV’s The Hub.
Where you can enable WAF in the Hub.
In the Hub, you can also add IPs to the Allowlist and Blocklist. Also, there is a User Agent Allowlist, User Agent Blocklist, URL Allowlist, and an area to disable Rule IDs.
For more information on WAF and our hosting, be sure to read this article all about it.
6. Protect Your Logins with 2FA
2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) is a great added line of defense when it comes to protecting your site. You can enable it in Defender and adjust a ton of its capabilities.
Once activated, you can choose the user roles you want to enable two-factor authentication for. Those users with those roles will then have to use Google’s Authenticator app to log in.
User Roles can be set to two-factor authentication with one-click.
Below this area, you can activate Lost Phone, so that if a user is unable to access their phone, they can be sent the password to their email instead.
Along with that, you can Force Authentication for all users. There’s also an option to add a Custom Graphic for the login field (Pro only).
Additional settings in the 2FA area.
You can customize the default settings for the Lost Phone email, get quick access to the app download for Google Authenticator for Android & Apple, and view your active 2FA users.
More 2FA options and settings.
If you ever need to deactivate 2FA, you can do so with one-click.
This is a great necessity for security and also have more options for users to gain access when needed.
7. Enhance Site Security with Advanced Tools
Defender has plenty of options for more advanced protection.
One big security measure is the Mask LoginArea.
Here you can create a customized URL for users and admin to login in. This helps prevent hackers and bots from finding your URL.
In this area, you can also redirect traffic to a specific URL to avoid 404s.
The Mask Login area.
Also in the Advanced Tools area is a section called Security Headers.
This is where you can add extra security by enabling security headers of various types, including X-Frame Options, X-XSS-Protection, Strict Transport, and more.
Several examples of security headers you can enable and what they do.
When you enable them, they will display any additional security options if applicable.
An example of additional settings for X-Frame-Options.
Coming to Your Defense
As you can see, Defender comes to your defense and has your WordPress site security covered. Oftentimes it just takes one-click or just sitting back and letting Defender take care of things automatically.
If you ever have any questions about security settings, malicious code, or just need some advice, our amazing 24/7 support staff is always here for you.
Do you use web forms to collect and store sensitive or personal information? It’s not uncommon, but have you ever stopped to consider whether anyone else can access this information?
Privacy is important, and so is speed. Do you display data from a database on your WordPress site? Have you noticed that it can sometimes be slow to load? Ugh…that’s never fun.
Over at CampusPress, we recently had a customer experiencing both of these problems.
They were migrating to our service and already using a popular WordPress form plugin to collect and store private files from job applicants. This was on their main, high traffic marketing website, which meant that their web team had full access to personal applicant information, and any potential security breach of the website could expose all this data, too. This definitely was not an example of good privacy practice.
The customer also was using a form for sorting and displaying complex directory information for their large organization. When searching the directory, it would often time out or load extremely slowly. Despite all of the problems, the customer didn’t want to leave their form plugin because they had invested so much time into building their systems around it and training their staff to use it.
This customer isn’t alone or unique, and although these common problems haven’t always had easy fixes, now they do. It was looking for better solutions for sites like these that led me to the new FortressDB plugin.
What is FortressDB?
FortressDB is a plugin for WordPress that now easily integrates with our form building Forminator plugin.
Forminator is pretty happy to work with FortressDB.
Instead of defaulting to the WordPress database, or saving files in the wp-uploads public folder, FortressDB stores data and files on secure Google Cloud servers and gives you full control of who has access to it.
It uses native WordPress user roles to control access rights and there are built-in Gutenberg blocks to display data blazingly fast in tables, charts, and maps. FortressDB offers 3 different locations for storing data: Europe, the USA, and the UK.
When you create an account, you choose which location to use, and you can even store data in FortressDB in a different country than your website may be hosted.
So…
Why Use FortressDB?
The WordPress database is designed to store content for the public web. Increased regulations and responsibilities in privacy laws mean that now more than ever, we must consider where and how data is stored.
For example, many WordPress hosts do not encrypt WordPress database data at rest or in backups. This might be reasonable for content on your site that is public on the web anyway, but for more sensitive data, FortressDB can help ensure full encryption.
File uploads, even if you use privacy plugins to set a site as private, may still be discoverable by search engines or by direct links. Using FortressDB, you can guarantee that everything you set to private really is private.
Large datasets can add significant size and bloat to your WordPress database, but FortressDB will keep form data out of your WordPress database to help with performance.
It is fast too, check out this million row demo. You can compare it to how a CDN delivers rich-media content. Instead of serving images or videos, it serves data.
There are other solutions for collecting and storing data outside of WordPress, but this is the only native WordPress plugin we are aware of, and definitely the only plugin that integrates with Forminator in just a few clicks (with more form plugin integrations coming).
There’s an API for a simple way of extending and using the secure databases without form plugins too.
How it Works
As you’ll see, it’s quick and easy to set up FortressDB with Forminator.
Here’s a breakdown of how to integrate the two. Then, I’ll show you a video demonstration.
Once you have FortressDB installed and have signed up for a free account, you’ll be all set to integrate with Forminator.
With either a new or existing form in Forminator, you can sync FortressDB by going to Edit Form and Integration.
The Integration area in Forminator.
From here, you simply click Activate App. As long as you have FortressDB installed, activated, and you’re logged in, you’ll be all set. FortressDB will appear as one of your connected apps.
Where you’ll activate the app.
It will then confirm that you want to connect…
Hit Connect to continue.
…and from this point upon hitting Connect, your form is synced to FortressDB as a Table.
You can access it at any time by going to the FortressDB admin area and clicking Secure Forms. Here, you’re able to review any user that has filled out a form and all of the fields of information that were created with Forminator. It also includes the date and time it was created.
Example of information that was inputted into a form.
You can edit information on objects by clicking on each one individually.
Where you can edit information on an object.
In the Access rights area, you can also limit users’ access to the database based on roles.
The Access Rights area.
Also, you can view stats at any time from the Stats tab. This will show you the total rows that are new for a particular amount of time.
Where you can view your stats on your form submissions.
To see all of this put together and in action, here’s a quick video demonstration.
Sign Here
With the release of Forminator Pro 1.13, there is now an eSignature feature on forms so that your users can sign a form and submit. FortressDB stores the form and keeps the signature separate in its database.
In Forminator, you just add the eSignature field to any form.
The E-Signature field.
Now a user can sign and submit a form by signing with their mouse, keyboard pad, or with their fingers or a digital pencil, when applicable.
Where a user can sign and submit a form.
The signature is then saved as an image .PNG file in FortressDB. You can download it at any time in the admin.
Where you can access and download the signature.
To see exactly how this operates, check out this quick example.
With Forminator and FortressDB, it’s simple, easy, and safe to have your eSignatures secured.
For more information on eSignatures with Forminator, including how to incorporate an upload signature option, you can find out more in this article.
FortressDB and Forminator: A Secure Combination
FortressDB and Forminator are both free, so give them a shot and try them out for yourself and see how well they work together. Then, if needed, you can upgrade both accordingly. Upgrading allows for additional features, such as additional WordPress sites with FortressDB and the eSignature option with Forminator Pro.
Plus, if you need to upgrade, we’ve scored a 50% discount for WPMU DEV members over on our Partnership page.
Give it a try along with Forminator and let us know what you think, for security sake.
Signed, sealed, and delivered! With the release of Forminator 1.13, you can now receive electronic signatures on your WordPress forms and take advantage of several new requested features.
Forminator‘s new eSignature addition means that visitors can sign by mouse, trackpad, or finger (with touch devices) before submitting a form. Or, if they prefer, they can even upload signatures!
Inserting an eSignature form in your WordPress site has never been so simple. Users can now sign with their own signature…
…or upload them!
I’ll show you how to quickly and easily set up a form both ways and put it to use today! Plus, I’ll fill you in on other exciting updates and upgrades to Forminator’s latest version.
How to Create a New Form with eSignature in Forminator
You can have an eSignature form set up and ready to use in just a few minutes (or less).
Just go to the Forminator dashboard and click the Create button to create a new form. If you need help learning how to set up a form, we show you step-by-step ways to create one here.
With the new form, select the E-Signature field in the Insert Fields screen.
For this example, we’ll create a basic contact form that will include Name and Email.
Once you click those fields, hit Insert Fields to continue.
Pick the fields you want to include in your form.
Customize and edit the fields any way you want. Simply click the edit button and the Edit Field option.
What you’ll click to edit the fields.
The Signature field has a Labels tab where you can adjust the label, placeholder, and description.
The Labels tab.
There’s also a Settings area where you can adjust the signature file type to save your user’s signature in, customize the height of the signature field, adjust the stroke thickness, and even an option to force users to fill out this field.
The Settings area to adjust several options.
If you want to incorporate CSS classes into your form you can do this in the Styling tab.
Where to add any additional CSS classes.
Finally, in the Settings area, there is the Visibility section.
The Visibility section where you’ll add rules.
This is where you can add Rules based on conditions and values (I’ll show you this below when we insert a file upload option).
An example of a rule.
In addition to being able to customize your e-signature forms, Forminator lets you edit options like recipient email notifications, colors, style, and more in the Edit Form area.
When you’re happy with the form you’ve created, preview it and hit Publish.
Presto! You now have a form that users can complete with their eSignature!
Example form with eSignature.
Forminator will give you a shortcode that you can use on your WordPress site in a post, widget, or page.
Along with signing digitally, users can also…
Add a Signature Upload Option
If you want to take eSignatures to the next level and give users an option beyond signing with their mouse or fingers, you can create a form with the capability to upload an existing signature. This is great for mobile devices and tablets, as you can upload a sig pic in a snap (try saying that 5x quickly).
When you create a new form, insert a Radio and Upload File fields along with the other necessary fields for eSignature.
The Radio and Upload file fields.
We’ll go in and edit the Radio field and edit the Label and Options.
For the label, I’ve added the text: Do you want to sign or upload an existing signature image? You can customize the text however you want.
For the Options, I’ve added Sign and Upload Image. Also, click the Selected box next to Sign.
The Radio options.
After doing this, hit Apply.
Next, go to the Upload Field and edit its sections.
You may want to select Multiple in the Type tab. Also, change the Label to something like Upload Signature.
The Upload field area.
In the same area, click the Settings tab.
Change the File Upload Limit to one (multi-file uploads is a new feature that I’ll mention shortly). You can change this to multiple file uploads, but “1” looks more user-friendly and is all that you’ll probably need in most cases.
The file upload limit settings.
After you’ve done this, click Apply.
Next, go to the Signature field and the Visibility tab.
Here, you can adjust the settings to include the rule of signing or uploading an image in the Field section.
Also, make sure the Condition is required and you have Sign as the option.
Visibility settings where you can see the condition is set at ‘Is’ and ‘Sign’.
Then, click Done and Apply.
Go to the Upload Field and set a similar condition there — just like the one you created in the Signature field.
The only difference is in the dropdown, you’ll want Upload Image to be displayed.
The Upload Field visibility section where ‘Is’ and ‘Upload Image’ are the conditions.
And once you have completed this, hit Apply, and you’re all set!
When you preview the form, you’ll see that there are now two options for signature fields: Sign or Upload Image.
Here’s what the form looks like when ‘Sign’ is selected:
The Sign preview.
And when ‘Upload Image’ is selected:
The Upload Image preview.
Users can drag and drop or choose files when uploading their eSignatures.
It’s always good to have options and now users can have their preferred method of signing the form.
Why You Will Want to Use eSignatures
Besides receiving a ton of requests from our members for this feature, eSignatures have a number of benefits and advantages that you might not be aware of, such as:
Simplicity: eSignatures are simple and easy to use. This is probably the biggest reason to use them and Forminator makes it effortless and effective.
Security: eSignatures are a safer and more secure option than using traditional paper documents. Why? Because you not only get their signature, you also have traceable information on when they signed it, who signed it, and where it was signed. Try to beat that using traditional paper!
Convenience: With more and more businesses working remotely and transacting around the world, electronic signatures allow for remote authentication. That’s much easier (and cheaper) than mailing, printing, or scanning documents. And…we’re one step closer to living the paperless office dream…woohoo!
Speed: Signing forms and documents digitally can all be done in a matter of seconds, so there’s much faster turnaround time.
Low Cost: You save money on paper, postage, supplies, and time. Time is money, money is money, and using eSignatures saves both!
It’s Legit: eSignatures are legally valid and can be used on registration forms, online petitions, any terms of service agreements, non-disclosure agreements, application forms, contracts, and more.
The Future Is Now: You’re seriously not thinking about buying a new (gulp!) fax machine, are you?
Now that you know all about signature forms…
What Else is New?
eSignature forms weren’t the only new features released in version 1.13. Forminator has some other goodies up his digital sleeve, including:
Multi-file upload: One of the new features is multi-file upload. It allows your users to upload more than just one file in the File Upload field with a drag & drop interface.
Advanced Date field Restrictions: The Datepicker field now has a Limits tab. This is where you can restrict selectable dates in your form date picker field (e.g. future dates only, specific days of the week, etc.).
Integration with FortressDB Plugin:FortressDB is a WordPress plugin that works by storing data files on a secure Google Cloud server and gives you full control over who has it, instead of saving files in the wp-uploads public folder. FortressDB now integrates with Forminator.
Keep in mind, eSignatures are only available with Forminator Pro. All of the other new 1.13 updates are available with Forminator’s free version.
If you’re not a WPMU DEV member and want to check out Forminator Pro, try us for free for 7 days. You’ll get 24/7 support, access to all of our other award-winning plugins, blazing-fast hosting, and much more.
A Sign of Things to Come
Features like eSignature are a sure “sign” of our commitment to keeping on improving Forminator and all of our other plugins regularly.
You can keep tabs on what’s coming up next for all our plugins by checking out our Roadmap.
Finally, a special thanks to our developers for the continued improvements and maintenance that keep Forminator forming 5-star reviews.
Hackers can be persistent at trying to get into your site and drop malicious code, figuring out your credentials, and leaving spam. Thankfully, with WPMU DEV’s 5-star security plugin, Defender, you can set up a firewall, block IP addresses with customized lists, and more…leaving troublemakers unable to take even the first step into your WordPress site.
This tutorial will demonstrate how easy it is to set up Defender’s IP banning and keep your WordPress site safe.
Here are 8 areas we’ll be covering (jump to a specific topic by clicking on it):
Most areas of this tutorial are accessible in Defender under the Firewall and IP Banning section unless specified differently.
Let’s get started with the best and most powerful feature of Defender’s firewall…
1. Automatically Identify Bad Acting IP Addresses
Defender automatically identifies bad acting IP addresses and adds them to a firewall, providing your site with ongoing security and protection.
You can lock out users who attempt a number of failed login attempts. Defender gives you control over the threshold and duration of the lockout in the Login Protection screen (Defender > Firewall > Login Protection).
Defender lets you set how many failed login attempts will trigger a lockout for a user’s IP address.
You can view how many IP addresses have been temporarily blocked in the Active Lockouts section of the IP Banning screen (Defender > Firewall > IP Banning > Active Lockouts). You can also unblock IP addresses here.
View and release temporarily blocked IP addresses in the Active Lockouts section.
You can also enable 404 detection (Defender > Firewall > 404 Detection), and Defender will automatically block IP addresses that repeatedly request pages on your website that don’t exist. It will also temporarily block these offending IP addresses from accessing your site.
Defender’s 404 detection blocks IP addresses that repeatedly request pages on your site that don’t exist.
Tip: You can use the 404 detection feature in combination with Defender’s login masking feature to immediately identify and block IP addresses requesting your site’s login page.
In addition to Defender’s automatic IP blocking features, you can also block IPs manually, as the next section explains.
2. Creating a Custom Blocklist & Allowlist
Creating a custom blocklist & allowlist with Defender will keep unwanted IPs from accessing your site.
It’s done by easily entering any IP addresses. This includes admins, too.
The first area is for your Blocklist.
The area to enter your blocklisted IPs.
You can type out any IPs you want to be blocked, and they’ll no longer be able to access your site.
When you scroll down a bit further, you’ll have the option to add IP addresses to your Allowlist.
The Allowlist area.
It’s the same as the blocklist, where you just enter the IP addresses that you’d like to always have access to your WordPress site.
IPv4 and IPv6 are both supported for the blocklist and allowlist.
Note: We recommend adding your own IP to avoid getting locked out by accident. Your current IP address will be shown below the allowlist and you can easily copy and paste it in.
When you have all the information added to the blocklist and allowlist, there’s a Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen that will save everything.
Unwanted IPs are no longer going to be stopping by your WordPress site.
3.Active Lockout Displays
You can easily view any IP addresses that are blocked from accessing your site based on your rules.
Active lockouts screen.
Once you start having lockouts, they’ll all be compiled here. You can see how many IP addresses are currently blocked.
And if you need to unblock any IPs, there’s…
4. Unlocking IP Addresses
Sometimes an IP is blocked or banned and you need to unblock it for many reasons.
Defender makes it simple to release any IP addresses from the Active Lockout area by hitting the Unlock IPS button.
You can see there are 30 IP addresses currently blocked here.
This will reveal all of the blocked IP addresses and it’s one-click to unblock them by clicking Unblock.
Where you’ll unblock an IP address.
There’s no need to hit anything further after this. It will unblock the IP and you’re all set.
You can also search for specific IPs in the search area if you’re having difficulty locating them on the list.
5. Location Banning
Along with IP addresses, you can also ban entire countries with Defender. This feature is handy when you don’t want or expect traffic from specific locations and want to put a stop to hackers and bots visiting from certain areas.
All of this can be achieved in the Locations section.
Defender works with a company called MaxMind, so it can have access to the GeoLite2 Database. It’s free to set up an account and will ask you to do so when first setting up location banning.
The Locations area. When you get started with Defender, it asks you to set up an account with MaxMind.
There are prompts for a free account. From there, they’ll email you steps to set up a password. Once you login in, you click the link for a new license key in Defender’s dashboard.
Create a new license key in MaxMind and then it will be ready to copy and paste into Defender.
Where a new key is produced.
Once your new license key is pasted, you’ll be all set once you hit the Download button. It may take a few minutes for the key to register, so keep that in mind.
Now you have the option to Blocklist & Allowlist any country.
There is a drop-down menu that displays them. Once you start typing, it will populate any corresponding countries that start with that letter.
The drop-down menu of countries. Select as many as you’d like to blocklist or allowlist.
They’ll all appear in the box below your choice of blocklist or allowlist. You can also take them off the list by clicking on the ‘X’ next to the country’s name.
List of the countries added so far.
When completed, it’s all saved by hitting the Save Changes button.
6. Creating Custom Messages for Banned Users
Give any locked out hacker a customized message from Defender himself. All of this can be done in the Message area.
You have the ability to add a customized message in this space.
Where you’ll type in a customized message.
And after that, anyone that is on the blocklist will be greeted by Defender.
Defender is here to tell them what’s happening.
After clicking the Save Changes button, the message will be functioning and unwelcome guests will know why they’re IP isn’t making the cut.
7. Importing and Exporting Blocklist & Allowlist
If you have a blocklist or allowlist from another website and want to import them, it’s quick and easy to do. Likewise, you can export your list that you have for blocklist and allowlist to use on another website.
All of this is under Import and Export in Defender.
Where you can import and export blocklist and allowlist.
There’s an Import button to import and Export button to export a list.
Importing will not remove existing IPs. Also, when you export, it will include the blocklist and allowlist.
8. Check Your Lockout Log for Suspicious Activity
You can view all of your lockouts and quickly ban, allowlist, or delete the list in just a couple of clicks. Plus, you can easily download your activity logs of IP lockouts.
This, unlike the previous sections, is located in Firewall and Logs on Defender’s dashboard.
Where you can view all of your lockout activity.
Once here, you can sort logs by the latest, oldest, or IP address. You can also export them as a CSV and adjust the date range.
Where you can sort the logs.
Also, take care of the issues in one-click with Bulk Update. You can ban, allowlist, or delete just by checking the boxes individually or by the dropdown to take care of them all.
Take care of things in bulk with the bulk update.
You can also get more detailed information by clicking on the arrow dropdown next to the issue. There, you’ll also have an option to allowlist or blocklist.
And just like that, all of your lockouts are now taken care of.
Setting Up a Lockout Firewall Can’t Get Any Easier
Unwanted guests won’t get far with Defender’s custom IP address lockout.
And it’s more than just customized IP address lockout — there’s custom messages, location banning, logs, and much more with Defender.
